In November 2021, Cloudinary teamed up with Dolby.io to participate in their Build the World With Dolby.io Hackathon aimed at sparking spectacular and innovative hybrid audio- and video-conference experiences. Invited were developers and creators from around the world to compete for a prize pool valued at over $25,000. Not only did the hackathon grant those professionals the opportunity to supercharge their projects' media assets with Cloudinary’s unique features, but it also enabled them to join a series of talks given by Cloudinary's resident media experts: Tessa Mero, Becky Peltz, Paige Drake, and Scott Wachtmann.
Between July 29 and August 3, the Google Developer Student Community of the University of Lagos, Nigeria participated in a week-long hackathon called Open Hack Week (OHW). Sponsored by Cloudinary, Interswitch, the Ogundipe Foundation, and other notable organizations, OHW comprised 14 teams, five developers each. After six days of brainstorming and coding, the teams successfully built the minimum viable products (MVPs) for their projects, which they subsequently presented to all the attendees.
Look around any software company and you're almost bound to see developers, headphones on, coding away to their favorite tunes. For most developers, music plays an important role in their lives: from listening to it while they work to attending concerts or major music festivals, like Coachella and South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW).
Over the past several years, I've had a chance to participate in hackathons, as part of teams that developed a social payment app and helped users decide meals to cook. But it wasn't until last month that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.
Music videos, which comprise an important part of the video-streaming industry, are consistently the most-viewed content on streaming giants, such as YouTube and Vimeo. In exchange for free viewing, those channels serve advertisements for revenue. That business model creates a clumsy user experience, however, as a result of often-repeated ads that don't relate to the content.
Last month, we had the pleasure of supporting Capitol Music Group’s first ever hackathon, the first in a series of hackathons as part of its newly launched Capitol360 Innovation Center, established to bridge the gaps between music and tech and make music better for everyone. We are proud to be a founding technology partner and were honored to play a part in Capitol’s first-ever 24-hour hack. And because so many of us are avid and longtime music fans we’re also personally thrilled to have the opportunity to work with one of the most influential leaders in music to foster these new and meaningful connections.
For 48 hours, over a hundred strangers worked together to form over twenty great teams to demonstrate shared ideas in working form. Our theme for the event was The Pivot, as we approach an inflection point in the tech community from a so-called “broligarchy” to a more representative culture. This was Developer Camp’s 10th Anniversary event, and we brought together our most diverse group of participants ever:
This year at SXSW, we’re infusing Cloudinary’s powerful Visual APIs to the SXSW Hackathon, where teams compete on high-tech creativity during a straight 24-hour programming event. Taking place at TechSpace, this exciting event will culminate with demos and awards at the Hilton (Salon C) on Wed, March 15 at 2pm.