We Came, We Hacked, We Sponsored

Recently, Progress sponsored HackTECH, one of the largest hackathons on the west coast, held in Santa Monica, CA. The event drew more than 1200 students from CalTech, UCLA, USC, Harvey-Mudd College, Pomona College, UCSD, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, and other schools across the United States, and more than 40 sponsors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, EMC, Google, Ebay, Cloudera, Apigee, Cisco, and MongoDB!

We were extremely pleased with the student interest in participating in Progress’ sponsored API prize contest – of course, we did coax them a little by offering a chance to play with Gimbal beacons if they partook in our contest ;).

To kick off the API contest, Progress Vice President of Technology, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart presented to students about the Internet of Things (IoT) and explained the drag and drop, rapid application development capabilities of Progress Rollbase, part of the Progress Pacific platform. Participants then competed for two awesome prizes: an iPad mini retina for the person who developed the best Rollbase application, and a Philips Hue starter kid to the best Rollbase application leveraging IoT.

The winning team was from Santa Clara University, a group of students who developed an application (on the spot!) that was able to interact with Gimbal beacons and Progress Rollbase. Did we mention the team had no prior Rollbase or iOS experience?! That's right! These outstanding students showed how quick and easy it is to develop an application using Progress Pacific.

Want to try out our rapid application development platform for yourself? Get started on your free trial of Progress Rollbase today.

Psssst....We are also gearing up for upcoming hackathon, LA Hacks!  Sign up to attend and keep an eye out on our blog for more details on what we’ll be up to, coming soon!