Ericsson's Hackathon slogan is "Time to innovate, time to experiment, time to concentrate, time to learn," and our Autumn Hackathon truly embodied it!

Time to innovate

Despite our busy lives, Hackathons give us time to innovate; this time, people jumped at the opportunity. The Autumn Hackathon was Ericsson's biggest ever, with more than 1350 people participating at 20 sites worldwide! Together, they worked on almost 400 ideas.

Time to experiment

At Ericsson, people can participate in a Hackathon with any idea, even if it falls outside Ericsson's traditional business. In addition to giving free hands, we usually have challenges to inspire people with specific topics and then have inspirational sessions related to the challenges before the Hackathon. On this occasion, we challenged our people to experiment with the Vonage APIs.

At the Ericsson Developer Conference, there was a presentation from Vonage and a Vonage API code-along session to get people ideating. In the global Hackathon opening, Richard Sueselbeck from Vonage gave a short introduction to Vonage, their business, and API-driven development in general. Furthermore, Richard talked about the Hackathon culture at Vonage and introduced the challenge: "Best use of Vonage APIs."

Time to concentrate

Hackathons allow Ericsson employees to concentrate for 28 hours or, for example, two business days on something they are passionate about with like-minded people. We want to have inclusive Hackathons that everybody in the company can attend. Therefore, we call them Hackathons/Non-Hackathons. The only difference between a Hackathon idea and a Non-Hackathon idea is that implementing a Non-Hackathon idea does not require coding. As always, also this time, some participants were concentrating on Non-Hackathon ideas, such as making development activities more sustainable and improving the way we work using Appreciative Inquiry.

Time to learn

Our slogan indicates that Hackathons are also learning opportunities. Of course, all Hackathon participants learn while hacking, as now many have learned about Vonage APIs. But some participants concentrate fully on learning. This time, we offered several learning challenges. We had a code kata session. Furthermore, we challenged people to Capture the flag (CTF) and develop subtle security bugs to learn how to avoid them. Before the Hackathon, we created a learning pathway for participants with several hours of learning material related to product security.

Good Samaritan

Vinoth Somasundaram and Vikram S B innovated a solution where it is possible to crowdsource traffic violations, roadblocks, and accidents from Good Samaritans who want to contribute to society.

Pictured Vinoth Somasundaram and Vikram S B

While doing that, Vinoth and Vikram wanted to experiment with the Vonage AI Studio. How did they come up with the experiment? "The AI studio – conversation designer caught our eyes. It was cool – as we know the pain of building AI conversation in earlier days using NLP and how bad it is without a good training set. AI studio was cool; initially, we could not think of any catchy enterprise use cases. But soon, we started thinking about something that could simplify crowdsourcing with a tangible business and societal impact. We believe the messenger applications like WhatsApp or Telegram will become the new Super APP. We aimed to demonstrate that the developer community can easily build value-added products using this ecosystem and monetize, which is a clear win-win."

How was it to use the Vonage APIs? "Very intuitive. Conceiving an idea, prototyping, and publishing it to the real world within hours gives a sense of satisfaction that PowerPoints do not. No offense." Therefore, Vinoth and Vikram needed to concentrate on their idea only for a couple of hours.

While working with their idea, they also learned. "The results humbled us and reminded us that we shall not shy away from something because it is new, difficult, or impossible. Something is new only until we learn. This also reminds us of a 2000-year-old Tamil proverb "தொட்டனைத் தூறும் மணற்கேணி மாந்தர்க்குக் கற்றனைத் தூறும் அறிவு" Which translates to: "In sandy soil, when deep you delve, you reach the springs below; The more you learn, the freer streams of wisdom flow." So, for sure - we are now a bit wiser than before the Hackathon."

In the end, Vinoth's and Vikram's idea was selected as the best use of Vonage APIs. What did they like the most about the Vonage Challenge? "Buying a number through API is cool. It inspired us. On the IoT Space, where we work, we need to collaborate to simplify and abstract things to an extent that one can buy and sell Device Twins or Digital Twins through APIs and start using the feeds from it - abstracting everything below like the physical device, its hardware, firmware, battery life, connectivity etc. We are sure that we will reach there soon."

Congratulations Vinoth and Vikram!

We also had two runners up in the Vonage challenge:

Emil Zhang, Jianshao Wu, Xiaocong Zhong, and Zhipeng Kong decided to innovate around voice-based authentication. They experimented with the use of Vonage APIs, together with Python. Luckily, Vonage provides step-by-step guides for each API and code examples for different languages, including Python. Similarly, they devoted only a few hours to integrating the Vonage APIs, and it was all done successfully in a short timeframe. Besides learning about the Vonage APIs, they discovered that "If the user speaks too fast, voice cannot be recognized correctly sometimes, but this can be easily fixed by tuning some API parameters."

Ingit Kumar Saxena and Diksha Sharma B proposed an innovative idea about incident notifications and experimented with Vonage APIs for this purpose. When concentrating on exploring the APIs, they noticed that they are easy to use and that the documentation is user-friendly. While experimenting, they learned that Vonage has many other APIs available "We got to explore many other APIs, like the ones related to video and verification, which can also be used in other use cases."

Hackathons/Non-Hackathons give us all endless possibilities to do things we are passionate about with like-minded people. They provide us with time to innovate, time to experiment, time to concentrate, and time to learn. This may be something for you to consider as well!

Learn more about Ericsson's Hackathon culture by watching a video, hearing Hackathon stories from our colleagues, or reading a blog post.