POSTPONED: hackathon 2023

The City of Campbell River’s Economic Development team has made the decision to postpone the Hackathon due to circumstances out of our control. We will work to reschedule the event in 2024.

Hackathon Key Points

-       Three-day event

-       Judged by the business community, with prizes awarded.

-       The outcome will be software solutions delivered as dedicated applications (desktop, mobile) or Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

-       Functional prototypes would be the minimum, with a first alpha solution being ideal. 

-       Team size: between two to four people. Apply as a team of up to four members or as an individual, whereby you would be placed into a team.

The Categories

These are the industry categories and their official definitions, from which you and your team can choose as you think about a significant problem/solution set:

Natural ResourceS

From shrimp to kelp, growing food is an important industry for our hungry planet. Forestry, mining, and other vital sectors within the category of natural resources can all use your ideas and solutions.

Retail

Local businesses are vital to Campbell River’s economy. What great software idea/solution do you have for helping to take the retail sector to the next level?

TOURISM

Campbell River, the salmon capital of the world, offers fantastic attractions like fishing, hiking, biking, and more. We need your next-generation tourism applications that can help our industry bring even more tourists to our area.

Wild Card

Have an excellent product or service that is outside the main categories? This one is for you.

inspirational Ideas

Here are some examples of projects you can grab or bring your own!

1.   Local area tourism. We as locals know and love where we live. There are all kinds of activities, restaurants, places to stay, and adventures to be had here in our home. Sometimes, it can be overwhelming to try and ‘see it all’ or to find that special place that is off the beaten path. Many tour operators, hoteliers, restaurant owners, and local shop owners have told us about how great it would be to have a mobile app that, with one scan of a QR code or app store download, would help the tourist or prospective tourist to not only find out about the great things to do, places to stay, and shops to explore but to also have the ability to plan a full trip here in the Campbell River area. A great mobile app with a planner, reservations, links to maps, and everything one would need to have a great visit. Over time, this app could potentially generate revenue and be a nice business.

2.   Interactive area guide. Many tourist attractions do not have the marketing budget for potential customers' attention, especially those tourists planning before arriving. This would be a fully interactive, local, what-is-happening-within-walking-distance application that would be supported by local organizations keeping their information up to date. This application could also have essential information such as the ferry schedules, airport flight information, etc., available within one location. This is a more focused tourism application that could also be part of the core tourism application mentioned above.

3.   Buy it here first. Imagine a browser plug-in that pops up when you are on any major ecommerce site and tells you that the thing you are looking at is available at a local retailer. Local stores could benefit from people being redirected to them in order to get their purchase immediately, locally, and for a comparable price. This solution would need to provide local businesses with a way to electronically respond to this instant query, very much a permission-based plug-in to the popular browsers.  

4.   GoGetIt. This would be an affordable application for local deliveries. A hyper-local flavor would be an application that offers thorough coverage of the Campbell River area, with low backend costs for retailers to encourage and attract the local operators of restaurants and other establishments to use the service.

5.   Local supplier help. The problem is that many businesses do not have the time or resources to regularly monitor supplier prices. There is often little communication from suppliers when prices are going to change, so businesses must rely on somebody to manually track these changes, or they miss them altogether. The solution is to create a program that allows users to upload supplier info (invoices, quotes, receipts) and have the program alert users when prices have changed. This removes the need to have somebody manually watching prices, provides peace of mind for business owners/purchasers, and would allow for more accurate accounting. By getting local businesses to use this type of management application, the next phase of development would be to allow for and coordinate bulk buying of goods and services at prices individual small businesses could not get on their own. For example, every small business selling soft drinks buys cups. By teaming up with other small businesses, a bulk purchase of cups of cauliflower prices for all the shops. In the local area, unlike some big cities, businesses help each other and know each other on a first name basis. This solution is a natural evolution and expansion of that helping-each-other ethos.