WearHacks 2016

If you’ve never been to a hackathon, you should definitely go. It’s an experience unlike any other and you will be amazed at the ideas that become a reality in the span of a weekend.

Following up our experience at last year’s WearHacks event, we hopped on a plane and headed to Canada to take part in the WearHacks 2nd Annual Toronto hackathon.

Things kicked off on Friday night where over 200 students, parents and volunteers were on hand for the opening ceremonies. After hearing about the various problems that could be solved during the weekend and seeing the wearable devices (Pebble Smartwatch, Oculus Rift, Myo Armband and more) that were available to use, the students broke up into teams to get to hacking.

Saturday is when things began to heat up as the teams were heads down working on getting their product ready for demo day on Sunday. In between coding, games of foosball and lunch, there were several keynote speeches given by prominent members of the tech community.

As Sunday rolled around, students started to feel the pressure as the deadline for product submission loomed near. With all of the entries in, the judges began their task of deciding which projects should be demoed live in front of everyone.

At the end, 10 teams were selected to pitch their ideas to the entire audience and 3 teams ended up walking away with prizes.

As we were one of the sponsors for the event, we also gave away a couple of Pebble Watches to the team that best used our API.

 It was a great weekend and we were really amazed and excited by the things these students worked on. We certainly look forward to coming back next year!

To check out a full recap, click the video below for our official Mailjet takes WearHacks Toronto 2016.