On the weekend of November 9 we, along with three leading IT companies (Socialbakers, GoodData and Avast), jointly organized the second Czech Hackathon.

41 enthusiasts gathered in Prague’s TechSquare to enjoy 42 hours of life hacking. After a short series of lightning talks on life hacking principles and hardware, the participants pitched their ideas and formed 10 teams. They set ambitious goals, but nonetheless most of the teams delivered a functional application, hence their voting for the winners was pretty tight.

The Winners

#1 Semantic Surveillance

Wanna get alerted when your dog enters the kitchen? When there’s a fire? Webcam + image recognition service + set of rules = the winner (Ondřej Veselý). He says:

 “At the Czech Hackathon everybody was amazingly keen on diving deep into technology and eager to apply it into daily life. This clearly made the teams get on the same wave truly quickly, and squeezed maximum out of participants' abilities. For example building a smart toothbrush prototype could take half a year in a corporate environment, but we made it during the weekend.

“Semantic surveillance technology attracted the participants probably by the great cost/value ratio. After 3 hours of development I could show a box that pronounces loudly what it can see (e.g. ‘car’, ‘person’, ‘plant’) and at the same time it has a strong commercial potential of intelligent surveillance system, which can in real-time understand the observed situation and react accordingly.”

#2 Smart Toothbrush

How well do your kids brush their teeth? Let kids compete, and watch their progress from your phone. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, Arduino, Fourier transform. We’re proud to have had 3 Kerio devs on this team.

#3 Thermostat

Do you want to warm your bathroom before you wake up? Turn the manual radiator valve with a tap on your phone. Arduino, a thermometer and a servo do the work, a smart app helps you control your home and schedule the temperatures.

You can checkout and contribute to the projects at https://github.com/CzechHackathon2014/.

More from Czech Hackathon 2014 at facebook.com/czhackathon or twitter.com/czhackathon.

Thanks to all participants, organizers and sponsors for making this fabulous event.