{"id":16663,"date":"2012-09-03T10:53:08","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T08:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=16663"},"modified":"2017-11-24T18:10:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T16:10:03","slug":"hackcyprus12-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/03\/hackcyprus12-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"hack {cyprus} *12 presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As I mentioned in a post yesterday<\/a>, I was going to see the presentations of project on the first Cyprus hackathon. \u00a0And I went. \u00a0And it was awesome!<\/p>\n

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It was a bit tricky to find and I nearly missed it, as I didn’t know all the buildings that belong to Cyprus University of Technology. \u00a0Luckily, I spotted a bunch of people in black t-shirts outside of the building. \u00a0And there are only three groups of people that wear black t-shirts: geeks, hard rock fans, and policemen. \u00a0I approached carefully, and once I knew these weren’t the police, I knew I would blend in and have a good time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The presentations were scheduled for 17:30, but all teams were finishing up, and people were tired, and there were a couple of technical issues that caused a small delay, so the actual starting time was more like 6-6:15. \u00a0Nobody minded though, I think. \u00a0There was plenty of drinks and food available for anyone who felt bored.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t bored at all. \u00a0It was fun to see so many geeks in one room. \u00a0There was plenty of hardware and software around, and there were even a few people that I knew from before. \u00a0I spoke with Marina Theodotou of Curveball fame, who is better known as founder and curator of TEDxNicosia<\/a>. \u00a0She gave me some good news in regards to TED – there will be another event, probably either in December or January. \u00a0Then I also spoke a bit with Julia Papageorgiou of JPP Marketing<\/a>, who was also one of the sponsors of the event, Christos, who was my classmate back in Intercollege and who I haven’t seen since, and Marios, with who we met a few times over the Ubuntu-Cy<\/a> events.<\/p>\n

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Anyways, let me get back on track. \u00a0Initially, there were about 15 teams. \u00a011 of them made it to the finish. \u00a0One of the finishes had some last minute problems, so they did not present. \u00a0That left us with 10 project presentations. \u00a0Here they are:<\/p>\n

Momendos<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Momendos is a mobile application that allows its users to record memories, thoughts and ideas correlated with a geographical place. \u00a0There is a way to browse your own records, as well as other people’s public notes when you are at or close to a specific place. \u00a0The application is integrated with Facebook, and will also provide a bridge to other social networks in the future.<\/p>\n

The presentation seemed OK, but the project, I guess, is rather pointless, since Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare all already provide the functionality of posting geographically tagged notes. \u00a0It escaped me why someone would want to have yet another app for this. But then again, we do already have multiple apps that do this, and each one of them has some sort of user base.<\/p>\n

Xlook<\/strong><\/p>\n

Xlooks is also a mobile application. \u00a0This one provided remote access from mobile devices to computers behind the firewall, using Dropbox API. \u00a0The team demonstrated three pieces of functionality – remote commands (Liux shell kind), camera images, and screenshots.<\/p>\n

While nothing special, this was a not bad at all idea and result for 30-something hours of work.<\/p>\n

MrPoint<\/strong><\/p>\n

MrPoint is a website project that attempted to map all sorts of Cyprus events. \u00a0The idea was to get data from several sources and places them on the same map, providing access by category or location. \u00a0The interesting bit was that when the team recognized the problem of locating events in Cyprus online resources, and started importing data from a few resources, they came to realize that even those resources that are there, don’t really have a good way of sharing that data. \u00a0Case in point was OnThisIsland.com<\/a><\/del>\u00a0CyprusEvents<\/a> website (thanks to Christos for the correction), which they used as a source of data. Though the site itself has a geographical mapping of venues an events, the data is not really shared through any specific API, so the team had to a bit of reverse engineering.<\/p>\n

The niche of events calendaring in Cyprus is close to me since the times I had a project of my own that attempted to improve the situation. \u00a0And while the area improved a lot in recent years, it’s still not quite there yet.<\/p>\n

I also think the team deserved some bonus points for implementing the website in responsive design, so that it would look equally well in desktop browser and on a mobile device.<\/p>\n

Robogammon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robogammon was the only project from all the presented that haven’t been completely developed at this hackathon. \u00a0The project is around a year old already, and has seen plenty of effort. \u00a0But there were still parts built during the event, so it deserved to be showcased. \u00a0The essence of the project is a robot that plays the game of backgammon. \u00a0It’s complete with advanced game software, a camera over the game board to identify the moves, and a robot hand to move the pieces for the computer player. \u00a0Altogether it looked pretty awesome and employed some interesting technology, both in hardware (Lego Mindstorms<\/a>, Adruino<\/a>) and in software (Google APIs, neural networks, etc).<\/p>\n

Here is a YouTube video<\/a> demonstrating the robogammon in action.<\/p>\n