On November 14^th, Volta hosted a Megathon, sponsored by Innovacorp. The Megathon was an Open Hackathon where Developers, Designers and Business people could pitch their ideas, form a team and build a prototype in 48 hours.

Groups had to work on new ideas at the hackathon, which was easy because almost 20 new ideas were pitched on Friday night. After the pitches, everyone crowded around the wall of hand written ideas on torn pieces of paper and scribbled their names on the projects they wanted to work on. Some said they chose based on the cool factor, and some chose projects they thought would win the grand prize of $1,000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All projects were uploaded to GitHub every few hours by Colin White, aka “The Megathon Man”….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some joked that the Megathon could have been called a “Pizzathon”…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the weekend, 15 teams worked on their projects – some didn’t even break to sleep (Thank you RedBull Atlantic). If you walked into Volta on Sunday morning around 7:00 a.m., you would have seen people coding who had been up all night, and some who worked until 4am and then fell asleep on a pile of bean bag chairs….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As people either woke up, kept working, or arrived from home on Sunday morning, the feeling of friendly competition among the groups was palpable. Work they did, and around lunch time the judges arrived and groups started to wrap up and get ready to demo or pitch their projects.

13 teams pitched to judges Gavin Uhma (Co-Founder of GoInstant and Founder of UIT), Sreejata Chatterjee (Co-Founder of LeadSift), and Tim Speed (Co-Founder of Compilr). The Megathon judges remarked that they were pretty much unanimous with deciding that World War V would take home first place prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those who were at the Hackathon know that World War V was not only an awesome game …but an awesome Demo. Chris Adams, Dawson Reid and Raphael Titsworth-Morin were the guys behind the game, and yes, they were some of the people to pull an all-nighter at Volta Saturday night. World War V is a real time, turn based strategy game that simulates a nuclear war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second place was awarded to Milo, which uses sensor data for a device that can tell you things like CO2 levels, letting you know what is going on in your own home. The Milo team also won the Bitness best hardware project award, and took home an Arduino.

Third Place went to the TP Team – which was an app that allows you to solve the first world problem of running out of toilet paper by joining a team and being notified when it’s all gone.

Over all it was an awesome weekend of coding, networking, creating and learning from your peers for the growing developer community in Nova Scotia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A big thanks to the Megathon sponsor, Innovacorp! They help high potential early-stage Nova Scotia companies commercialize their technologies and succeed in the global marketplace. They’re especially interested in the clean technology, information technology, and life sciences industries. In addition to their core business of investment, incubation and expert advice for individual companies, they also support the start-up community and culture across Nova Scotia.

Check out the other awesome teams that pitched at the Megathon!

THE WINDOW MANAGER: A device that allows you to control when and why your window blinds open and close.

TABY: Taby is the ultimate bookmark and tab state manager. Taby allows you to have all of your bookmarks saved to a git hub repository as well as save the state of your tabs.

 MAGIC: Magic is a Sudoku solver that allows you to populate any Sudoku into the system and have either the output of a single cell shown or have the final Sudoku shown.

 PostWord: This stack oriented programming language takes all the best from the others and puts it into one.

 Unfriendly Fire: Unfriendly Fire get you to sync up over wifi on your android device and battle it out.

 SnowCrypt: SnowCrypt allows you to encrypt all messages being sent through Facebook messenger in an attempt to keep your conversations private.

Group Dating: “Groupout” since then has changed their name to,“FourPlay” and is a double dating app that connects two pairs of friends based on preferences to meet up.

 Crouton the Barbarian Game: This platform game takes you on an adventure with Crouton the Barbarian.

Surf App: The surf app allows you to set the optimal conditions for surfing and will only wake you up if they are met.

Related articles categorized under General