A couple of announcements before the write up. Startup Iceland Conference is Today! and we have a couple of things that we did this year. We are LIVE streaming the event, here is the link. We have a mobile app that is available for Android and iOS. You can download the Android version here and the iOS version here.
Over the weekend we hosted the Startup Iceland Hackathon. The theme this year was 3D Printing, Mobile and Wearable Computing. We sold out all the tickets for the Hackathon, however we had only 3 teams that showed up to participate. I was a little disappointed with the participation only to find out the Hackathon event was competing with many things that were on-going like the Reykjavik City election, The Annual Sea men festival and Graduation party of all the high schools. Never the less, the 3 teams that participated really showed what can be done over a weekend.
The Winner of the Event was the team that created a solution for bridging the virtual gift world to something real through a 3D Gift Card. It is a clever workflow for all those who want to gift a virtual item but still give a physical present. With 3D gift cards you can give a computer game on Steam or an ebook by 3D printing a model with an embedded gift-code. Wrap your present and give to your favorite person! They get their online gift, plus a model to play with or display!
The other two teams did a couple of clever things as well. One of the teams created a Public-key-Private-key Encryption Address book. It is again a very useful solution given that we know each other’s email addresses these days but I would not know how to use your Public Key to encrypt a message to send to you if it is something that I don’t want anyone to see. I think the MailPile team actually want to integrate it and use it right away in their mail client. This is simple but very important service. I want to be able to publish my Public Key so you can use it to send me encrypted messages only I can decrypt. I am really interested in this space and it was great to meet the team that made this possible. This address book is live with even an Android app.
The third team was a team of 1, but a brilliant solution. He created a solution that converts any word into Braille signs. The use case he was going after was big signs in buildings etc. A perfect use case for a 3D Printer.
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