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.
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.
