Blake Burris

The day has finally come. I’m in NYC to kick off Cleanweb Hackathon round 2. Just a few months after a successful event and good time in San Francisco, we’ve kicked up the heat with a stellar line up for New York.

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Momentum has really spiked in the last two weeks. We will be near capacity at our NYU ITP venue and are expecting over 200 for the kick off at The New York Academy of Sciences Friday night.

During the earlier stages of planning I was certainly questioning the need for another hackathon in here given an increasingly crowded green, sustainability, open-data, hackathon activity. NYC has amazing momentum with open data (NYC Big Apps), hackathons, incubators like NYU ACRE and a crop of homegrown startups in this broadly defined space. Does NYC need an SF-import of this sort? Will they welcome us with their resurgent pride for the Gotham tech scene. Would we find an anti-Valley bias? These questions were certainly nagging my mind. 

As we continued making local connections in New York, and thanks to Sunil’s October meetings there, we found not only interest but excitement and a willingness to support the concept and promise of “Cleanweb” - onward march! With the date and venue set, it was on. Along the way, we enlisted the support of key sponsors, organizers, and an top-notch panel of judges. We couldn’t have pulled this off without the following big guns who volunteered many hours of their time: 

• Micah Kotch, NYC ACRE at NYU-Poly 
• David Gilford, NYC EDC
• David Yeh, Generation 
• Jean Barmash, Bright Power
• Nick Allen, Spring Ventures
• Jay-E Emmingham, Pratt Center
• Matt Solt, Civvic 
• Nicholas Eisenberger, Pure Energy Partners
• Chrysa Caufield, Tendril

And falling from heaven, we’re very excited to have Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, joining us on Sunday for presentations and awards. His visit comes just days after his launching of the Green Button initiative in California; which is a key enabler of consumer-centric Cleanweb apps and a focus of Tendril’s global competition culminating Sunday in at the hackathon.

With some great advance media stories posted already and a press conference on Sunday, the world will soon learn more about Cleanweb and the amazing progress innovators can make in the span of just thirty-six hours.

If you’re following the NYC event remotely, please check out our Hacker League site for participants and projects, follow us on Twitter and tune into the live stream from NYU Tisch ITP on Sunday afternoon (2-5PM EST); which GigaOm will be mirroring.

This is just the beginning. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via twitter. 

As we roll into 2012, I thought I should explain my fascination with Cleanweb, why it’s had my attention since early last year and what it means for my company, Dynamo.

Cleanweb broadly describes transformative opportunities for innovation at the intersection of IT and Energy. This description allows for everything from smartgrid companies like Silver Spring Networks, Efficiency vendors like ThinkEco and Nest to GetAround, Airbnb and OPower. 

Sunil Paul can be first credited with use of the term “Cleanweb” in his seminal blog post and his presentation at GreenNet (if not earlier). I was introduced to Sunil by a friend, Andrew Ng, who suggested we connect on my vision for transforming the consumer relationship with energy, efficiency and cleantech. It was in the process of reading up on his history and firm, Spring Ventures, that I discovered Cleanweb along with his work on Gigaton Throwdown - both pleasant discoveries .

You see, at the time (early 2011), we were just finding our way in clean energy - knowing we wanted to serve the user (real people) not the incumbents. We were promoting Dynamo as a Cleantech company and our prototype aggregated in-home usage data from disparate sources…sounded good to us. Cleantech really wasn’t a great conversation starter though and several people suggested we were more about “behavioral analytics” but we still didn’t have the bridge to connect the user with the things that would open up a dialog about energy or drastically change their consumption patterns.

Cleanweb helped us find our identity as a company and is increasingly defining our mission to solve the world’s energy problems by accelerating consumer adoption of cleantech and efficiency solutions. 

In my quest for success with Dynamo, I realized Cleanweb was something we needed to be widely recognized and promoted. I joined Sunil in an effort to recruit more people (innovators) who would also answer the Cleanweb call. Cleanweb Hackathon was established as the vehicle and the inaugural event was held in SF last September with great reception and results.  

The parade continues January 21-22 with a stop in NYC. Thanks to the help of an incredible volunteer team, I’m co-producing this event at NYU’s Tisch ITP. We’ve rolled out the carpet for participants to come out, join teams, and produce apps for prizes and exposure.

There’s also a Friday kick-off reception at the incredible New York Academy of Sciences. It’s going to be great event, so please join us, send friends, or tune in to the live stream.

Join the movement. Hit me up on twitter or tune into the #cleanweb chatter.

I tried jamming through the initial course but only got to 38% before I messed things up. Having read @parislemon’s post on Codecademy, I’m giving it another shot. 

parislemon:

…simply because they didn’t exist yet.

Codecademy.

About 6 years ago, I decided I was going to go back to school to learn how to code. I had very casually dabbled with some simple stuff ranging from HTML to C++, but decided I needed a more formal setting to truly learn. I was wrong.

It’s not that I didn’t learn anything going back to school — I did. But I was wrong that I needed to learn in a formal school setting. As any programmer will tell you, you’ll learn a lot more by doing things on the fly. 

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