Newsroom & Press Releases

MADhack 2018: Smart solutions for monitoring waste separation, managing public lighting and preventing illegal logging

Bratislava, Slovakia – November 7, 2018 – Resco, the leading provider of enterprise mobility solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, organized MADhack 2018 on October 26-27. It was the company’s 4th annual hackathon for IT students and young programmers.

This year, Resco also introduced the City Smart Services solution to municipalities in its home country, Slovakia. Therefore, over the next 3 months, MADhack participants will be working on assignments submitted by actual municipalities – to help Slovak cities, towns and villages solve issues utilizing the latest mobile technology and the internet of things (IoT). For MADhack 2018, Resco also partnered with Slovanet and the eIoT project, which provided further expertise on IoT.

5 Slovak towns and one of Bratislava’s city boroughs presented various challenges to the attending students. Problems with parking were brought up by Zabokreky and Bratislava’s Lamac borough. Krajne is a small town losing tens of thousands of Euros because of uncontrolled illegal tree logging. Utilizing smart technologies, its representatives would also like manage their public lighting network more effectively. Podkonice, a town in the Banska Bystrica region, wanted to acquire data on waste collection to optimize its waste separation budget and efforts. Lamac and Lovinobana were looking for tools to efficiently manage the maintenance of public playgrounds. And the satellite town of Hamuliakovo wanted to keep track of the rapidly growing number of non-resident citizens.

Assignments concerning the illegal logging, monitoring of waste collection and separation, and the management of public lighting piqued the most interest among the attendees. Each assignment will receive at least two alternative solutions, as the panel of judges (formed by experts from Resco and Slovanet) selected 7 teams for the finals.

The judges selected the finalists based on 5 essential criteria: feasibility of the solution, completeness of the vision, understanding of the problem, clear-cut project plan and fulfillment of the municipality’s specifications. Each team now has until February 2019 to work on their assignment and create a prototype of the solution that they will present in the finals.

Due to the nature of this edition’s assignments, Resco changed the format of the hackathon. What was originally a 48-hour coding marathon was transformed into a comprehensive project competition.

However, students won’t be left entirely on their own. We want to help them approach their assignments properly and create actual working prototypes, so they can consult their work with our experienced developers, programmers and IoT experts anytime throughout their project, said Juraj Mojik, Technical Product Manager at Resco

Radomir Vozar, Resco’s CEO and Co-founder, also explained why Resco is interested in exploring smart solutions for Slovak cities, towns and villages: Resco has helped companies with enterprise mobility and streamlining business operations for almost 20 years. Based on our Resco Mobile CRM we’ve created a solution for municipalities, called City Smart Services. We believe that municipalities too can take care of public needs in a better, simpler, and more and efficient way – when provided with the right tools to do so. I dare to say that Slovak municipalities are still only beginning to discover smart technology. Therefore, with MADhack 2018 focusing on smart solutions for municipalities, they can explore new opportunities in this area even further.

The winning teams of MADhack 2018 will be awarded financial prizes, adding up to €10,000. And participating municipalities will receive working solutions that can be implemented immediately.
 

About Resco

Resco, founded in 1999 in Bratislava, is one of the global leaders in developing cross-platform mobile software solutions. The team of Resco professionals utilizes its knowledge by designing products for corporate customers, developers, integrators, and end users. Today, Resco Cloud is utilized by more than 2000 corporate customers around the world. In 2018, Resco has also been recognized by Gartner in their Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms report.

Resco also provides City Smart Services – a unique CRM solution for municipalities. It gives authorities a tool that enables them to deal with the complete agenda related to public services in an efficient and simple manner. Resco offers City Smart Services to all Slovak municipalities free of charge.

For more information, please visit www.resco.net.