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Formation | 2015 |
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Type | Student-run non-profit organization |
Purpose | Bridging the gap between creators by making everyone fall in love with technology. |
Location | |
Key people | Iida Loukkaanhuhta (CEO) |
Website | http://www.hackjunction.com |
Junction is a hackathon organizer with headquarters Espoo, Finland. Started in 2015, Junction grew to be one of the largest organizers in Europe. In 2018 it expanded globally with a Junction event at Tsinghua University in China and cooperation with Chinese and South Korean universities bringing high performing students to attend the event in Helsinki. [1]
During the years Junction introduced various formats of events to its public, the biggest one being their yearly Junction Hackathon. This event brings together developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from around the world and helps them build solutions to real world challenges from local and multinational companies. [2]
Junction was first launched in 2015. The event was held on November 6-8th in Kattilahalli, Helsinki and gathered more than 550 participants and resulted in 145 different projects. Notable partners included Uber, Finnair, Supercell, Reaktor, and others. [3] [4]
The winner Junction 2015 was Slush Smackdown, from the Supercell Unlimited track. The team created a game where the players program their own boxer who then competes against other players' codes in real-time. It also won the whole Slush Hacks -hackathon competition main prize, worth 20 000 EUR. [5]
Junction 2016 was held on November 25–27 in Wanha Satama, in Katajanokka, Helsinki, Finland. About 1300 participants from over 77 nationalities attended the hackathon. Partners included Supercell, Zalando, the European Space Agency, General Electric, Sitra, Tieto, UPM and others. [6] [7] [8] [9]
The teams had 48 hours to develop their ideas and afterwards demo them to other attendants and judges. The main prize for the winning idea of the 2016 event was 20 000 EUR, and many companies offered their own bounties for solving challenges in a specific way or using pre-specified technology. [10] Teams were provided a number of different API's and other emerging technologies to develop their concepts including Oculus Rifts, HTC Vives, Apple Watches, 3D-printers, Microsoft Hololens, and Estimote Beacons among others.
The winner team was suju.online, who created a tool for event organizers and public transportation decision makers that allows them to design dynamic routing for the self-driving bus. The team originated from the local Aalto University and the hack was part of the Future of Mobility track. [11]
Junction 2017 was held on November 24–26 in Dipoli, the main building of the Otaniemi campus of Aalto University. About 1500 participants from over 90 nationalities attended the hackathon. [12] Partners included Spotify, Daimler, Smartly.io, European Space Agency, Microsoft and others. [13]
As always, the teams had 48 hours to work on their projects, with the event ending on Sunday with a demo expo. This year, the winner of the 20 000 EUR main prize was appointed using a new judging process. An open source technology called Gavel was used first to determine the finalists from each track. Then, a panel of expert judges inspected each finalist in delicate detail, even going through the project's code repositories.
The main prize was won by team Glados. The team created Signvision, a tool for maintenance personnel to map out traffic signs that need to be repaired. The hack was part of the Big Data track. [14]
Junction 2018 was held on November 23–25 in Dipoli, Espoo, Finland. About 1300 participants from all over the world attended the hackathon. [15] Partners included Facebook, Daimler, Supercell, McKinsey, Epic Games, Vkontakte, Ericsson and others. [16]
The teams had 48 hours to work on their projects, with the event ending on Sunday with a demo expo. For 2018, the reviewing process for the main-prize winner was improved further to make it more transparent for the participants. Instead of a multi-level process that was unclear to participants, Junction 2018 used a peer reviewing system, where the participants themselves chose the main winner. [17]
The winner project was Oneiro, created by the previous winning team Glados. [15] Oneiro is an application that lets electric vehicle owners rent their EV chargers for others in need. [18]
Junction 2019 was held on November 15–17 in the Väre building, where the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture and The Aalto University School of Business are located. About 1500 participants from all over the world attended the event. [19] Partners included CGI, Ericsson, Rovio, Microsoft, Valmet, Sitra, Business Finland and many more. [20]
Junction 2020 - Connected was held on November 6–8. The Covid-19 pandemic opened the doors for a hybrid event, gathering people all over the world to simultaneously hack in both physical locations and online. Partners included Genelec, HKScan, Paulig, OP, Supercell, Aito and Brella. [21]
The winner project was Saavi - healthy finance. The team presented a mobile solution for banks that helps their customers to understand the level of financial health by analyzing spendings and subscriptions with a help of machine learning — and got an entertaining experience of interaction with personal finance in AR. [22]
Junction 2021 was held on November 19–21. The hackathon was once again organized in a hybrid form, participants could attend live from one of the 8 hubs scattered around the world or join the challenge online on Gather. Partners included Huawei, Kone, CGI, Miro, Oras and others.
The main prize was won by team Nice-ify. The team created a solution that replaces hateful language with a nice-ified version in voice-chat environments.
Year | Project Name | Team Members |
---|---|---|
2015 | Slush Smackdown | Tuomas Husu, Kimmo Koivisto, Jaakko Nygren, Timo Lehto |
2016 | Suju.online | Matti Parkkila, Aleksi Jokela, Jere Vaara, Aleksi Tella, Henri Nurmi |
2017 | Signvision | Ville Toiviainen, Andreas Urbanski, Teemu Taskula |
2018 | Oneiro | Ville Toiviainen, Andreas Urbanski, Teemu Taskula |
2019 | Tassu Passu | Tulika Ganoo, Yevhenii Kalashnyk, Reinis Skorovs, Ronalds Sovas |
2020 [23] | Saavi – Healthy Finance | Alexander Zimin, Andrey Krylov, Andrey Volodin, Anton Lebedev, Egor Petrov |
2021 | Nice-ify | Bryce Cronin |
2022 | Bitter Sweet | Donghoon Jang, Sunghun Kim, Junseong Kim, Chansu Park |
2023 | Driving Change - In the Blink for Safety | Markus Andersson, David Enberg, Alex Granlund, Johannes Peltola |
Hel Tech is a non-profit tech meetup organized monthly in Helsinki, Finland. The meetups consist of keynote speeches, demos, research showcases and discussions, all focusing on a current tech topic. Past speakers have included Risto Siilasmaa (Chairman, Nokia & F-Secure), Ilkka Paananen (Founder & CEO, Supercell), Lidia Perovskaya (Project Manager, VKontakte), Kimmo Kanto (Head of Space, Business Finland), Anne Oikarinen (Senior Security Consultant, Nixu) and many more. [24] [25]
JunctionX is a global hackathon program launched in 2018 through which local teams across the world can organize a hackathon event in their own home city. JunctionX has been organized in various cities around the world including Tokyo (Japan), Hanoi (Vietnam), Budapest (Hungary), Seoul (South Korea), Thuwal (Saudi Arabia) and many more. [26] [27] [28] In 2020 JunctionX will expand to Exeter (United Kingdom), Algiers (Algeria) and Barcelona (Spain). [28]
Tech Race is a series of smaller hackathons where cities across Finland and Europe compete against each other. [29]
Terminal is the official pre-event of Junction. During Terminal participants take part in different activities in the Helsinki area and attend events hosted by partner companies. [30]
A smaller hackathon event where instead of solving companies' real challenges the participants compete on who comes up with the stupidest idea and execution.
Junction is a volunteer-based, non-profit organization composed mainly of students from different Finnish universities. [31] It is owned by the non-profit foundation Startup Säätiö, but gathers all of its funding from the partnership contracts between its partner companies.
Otaniemi (Finnish), or Otnäs (Swedish), is a district of Espoo, Finland. It is located near the border of Helsinki, the capital of Finland.
AaltoMedia Lab is a transdisciplinary laboratory focusing on digital art and design and its impact to culture and society. The Lab is part of the Department of Art and Media at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University in Finland.
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.
Mårten Gustaf Mickos is a technology executive based in San Francisco. He is the current CEO of HackerOne, a security vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.
Tietoevry Keilalahti Campus/Microsoft Talo is the head office building of Tieto and Microsoft Finland, located in Keilaniemi, Espoo, just outside Helsinki, the capital of Finland.
Aalto University is a public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. The close collaboration between the scientific, business and arts communities is intended to foster multi-disciplinary education and research.
Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a global community of technologists dedicated to solving problems for charities, non-profits and social enterprises by organising recurring hackathons that has existed since 2009. The organisation currently has a presence in over 20 cities throughout 5 continents, and had 2000 participants in 2017.
Supercell Ltd is a Finnish mobile game development company based in Helsinki. Founded on 14 May 2010, the company's debut game was the browser game Gunshine.net, and after its release in 2011, Supercell started developing games for mobile devices. Since then, the company has fully released six mobile games: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars and Squad Busters, which are freemium fast-paced games and have been very successful for the company, the first two generating revenue of €2 million per day in 2013.
The startup scene in Finland has given birth to companies such as Angry Birds, Supercell, Wolt, and many others.
Aaltoes, also known as Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, is a non-profit organization run by students, based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2009, Aaltoes has helped the rapid emergence of a startup culture in Finland in 2008-2011.
Saara Sofia Aalto is a Finnish singer, songwriter and voice actress. In 2012, she came second in the first season of The Voice of Finland.
HackTX is a 24-hour annual hackathon hosted by Freetail Hackers, a Computer Science student organization at The University of Texas at Austin.
GovHack is a significant annual open government and open data hackathon, attracting over 15,000 participants since 2009. First run as a small Canberra-based event, it quickly expanded to an international competition with simultaneous events taking place in major cities across Australia and New Zealand each year, with virtual events for remote and international participants. Since its inception, over 2,500 projects have been published by participants to demonstrate the practical value of open data.
MTF Labs is a series of festivals and events encouraging innovation through creative work, particularly music.
Helsinki Challenge is a science-based competition and idea accelerator which brings together the academic community and society at large to solve the world's grand challenges in cooperation. The competition goal is not only to create new scientific information, but to influence society.
ATMOS is the annual techno-management festival of BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, located in Hyderabad, India. It is known for a wide range of events, such as workshops, quizzes, lectures, technical exhibitions and competitions. Among the notable events conducted annually during it are the national level quiz Enigma and BITS MUN Hyderabad. Started in 2012, ATMOS aims at improving the technical culture among Indian colleges as well as providing a platform to showcase their abilities. In its sixth year now, ATMOS is growing rapidly with participation from students, academicians, entrepreneurs and speakers from all over India.
Slush is a startup and tech event held annually in Helsinki, Finland. Slush facilitates meetings between the founders of startups and investors such as venture capitalists, accomplished with events such as matchmaking and pitching competitions. Slush aims to build a worldwide startup community. In 2021, Slush brought together 8,800 attendees from around the world to participate together in this global networking festival.
VanHacks is an annual hackathon that is part of Vancouver Startup Week. The focus of the hackathon is creating solutions for local non-profit organizations from the Vancouver area over the course of 36 hours. Sponsors of the event have included KPMG, Best Buy, Slack (software), Lighthouse Labs, Nespresso, and Red Bull.
NaijaHacks is a hackathon and tech invention competition in Nigerian, which aims to encourage youth to use technology to create solutions for their communities and the world using technologies including blockchain and artificial intelligence. Officially, NaijaHacks is described as an official national "Movement of Makers, Leaders, and Disruptors".
Reaktor is a technology company, specialised in design, development and strategy of digital services and products.
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