Rating: Google’s lead NFC engineer is speaking
Claiming to be the UK’s first NFC hackathon – ‘Isobar Create London’ – together with O2,will award one winning team a £10,000 kickstarter fund courtesy of Proxama, a developer of near field communication (NFC) proximity marketing technology. The digital communications agency, Isobar, has teamed up with O2 to launch this UK event which builds on the success of previous Isobar create events held in Boston and San Francisco. Isobar Create London is to be held over a 36-hour period from 8am on Saturday March 24th to 8pm on Sunday March 25th 2012.The organisers hope that up to 100 developers and designers will descend on the trendy Shoreditch Studios in London to meet the challenge of creating new uses for NFC smartphone technology.
As well as the competitive element of the event, competitors will also be able to hear from keynote speakers including Brendan Marry, lead NFC engineer with Google Europe.
To turn their ideas into fully designed executions, competitors will be invited to use Proxama’s TouchPoint NFC marketing platform.
TouchPoint is a web facility that enables developers to build a fully branded NFC campaign with the ability to track and evaluate campaign activity.
To be in a with a chance of winning the Proxama prize, competitors will have to use its TouchPoint platform to demonstrate an idea that the judges feel is commercially viable and addresses a market opportunity that can be deployed over the next 12 months.
Proxama’s prize will take the form of the provision of the technical and commercial support, worth up to £10,000, to turn the original idea into a commercial proposition that can be taken to market.
Neil Garner, founder of Proxama, will be on the judging panel. He commented, “Now that NFC technology is becoming more accessible, events like this that encourage experimentation and familiarisation with it deserve to be supported.
Being at the heart of the NFC revolution, we are very keen to promote the use of NFC as a key marketing tool, so we’re delighted to be able to make available our TouchPoint marketing platform for this event and to offer a prize of real commercial value to the winners of Isobar
Create London.”
He added, “I am really looking forward to seeing the diversity of ideas that I am sure the competitors will develop.”
Dom O’Brien, head of innovation at Isobar UK comment, “Isobar Create London will bring the UK’s most talented developers and designers together to pioneer new uses of NFC.
We’re really excited to have Proxama involved in the event and make the TouchPoint platform available to help participants build their NFC solutions.”
More information available here.
