Hackathons are a great opportunity to innovate and produce crazy yet exciting products. A group of people from different technical backgrounds and domains come together and apply their skills to create an MVP for a real-life problem.

The theme for our 3rd Hackathon at OVO Energy was ‘From Insight to Innovation’ - create something both innovative and useful to help our customers in just 24 hours.

Kicking off

OVO staff from both the London and Bristol office came together on 24th November 2016 to participate in the hackathon. We had 6 competing teams made up of a mix of developers, UX, product and many other areas of the business.

The 24 hour countdown started in the afternoon on Thursday and, with the help of caffeine, snacks and meeting room naps, continued overnight through to Friday when we all came together to showcase our creations.

lets-get-started tshirts

Projects

HouseM8 - A mobile app that uses geofencing to split your utility bills with your housemates based on when you are in

Amazon Echo - Integrating your account with Amazon Echo allowing you to submit meter readings using voice control and get account information

Classification - Big data analysis to create a classfication model to categorise customers into groups and predict their energy usage

Bitcoin - Integrating OVO Energy PAYG app with BitPay so that customers can top up their smart meters with Bitcoins

OVO-gotchi - A virtual pet whose behaviour and mood depends on the health of the OVO services

Collaboration Plugin - IntelliJ plugin to enable remote file collaboration

brainstorming tshirts

Experience the hack

Check out the video of the hack for some highlights and interviews with the teams: