Hack4Europe, a hackathon dedicated to regional start-ups, has today garnered support from HP who will offer a visit to HP Labs in Palo Alto, California as one of the hackathon’s prizes.
Teams and individuals in five countries – France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom and Spain – will have two months in which to code innovative apps using the HP Helion Development Platform and HP Haven OnDemand.
Prizes for the best prototypes will be presented by French Secretary of State Axelle Lemaire at the final at the Ministry of the Economy in Paris in June. The aim for the hackathon is to developing applications that support innovation, economic growth and social inclusion in Europe.
HP will invite the winner of the "Make it matter – social positive applications and impact" category to visit HP Labs and meet with HP execs to further develop their application using the HP Helion and the HP Haven Big Data Analytics platforms.
"Cloud solutions demand extreme speed and massive scale with no-compromise big data analytics – and that’s where HP Haven OnDemand excels, providing the ability to understand and act on all forms of information, including both structured and unstructured data," said Gonzalo Usandizaga, EMEA vice president, big data, HP.
"Furthermore, the HP Helion Development Platform will give developers the tools they need to build and deploy high performance apps."
Working alone or in teams, Hack4Europe participants will use more than 50 APIs from www.idolondemand.com, the Platform-as-a-Service product in the HP Haven OnDemand suite to create data-driven applications.
www.idolondemand.com provides advanced functionality such as speech-to-text from audio/video in seven languages, prediction, optical character recognition, text and sentiment analysis and more.
Sharing, chat and video-conference functionalities will simplify online collaboration, and total integration with social networks will ensure that the challenge is available to innovators across Europe. To ensure compliance with local data security requirements, all apps will be developed 100% in-country.
In each participating country, a launch event will enable contestants to present their proposed applications and receive initial feedback on their ideas. The launch event for the UK contestants will take place on April 20 at Stack Overflow.
Ultimately, the 10 most innovative projects will be selected to take part in the final presentation.
