Public Safety apps for the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon
The AT&T Mobile App Hackathon in Atlanta over October 17th and 18th put a focus on Public Safety. John Gravois and I arrived to a diverse room full of programmers. From experienced developers to students from Georgia Tech, everyone was ready to hack the night away. John gave a brief speech about the Esri Developers site, along with talks from AT&T and Telerik and then idea pitches were presented and teams formed. The hacking lasted past midnight and continued bright and early the next day.
The AT&T Mobile App Hackathon produced many useful applications. The winner of the Best Use of Esri Technology went to Mark M. and Troy H. for their app Evacuate which utilized the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .Net.
Their application allowed a command center to mark locations that need to be checked and verified as cleared, and gave operatives in the field the ability to mark these locations as cleared, which would then send the update to the command center.
The winner of the Best Overall Public Safety App went to Haider K., Kevin C., and Matt H. for their app SafteyNet which utilized a combination of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript as well as the ArcGIS Runtime for iOS.
The idea for the application came from a member of the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department which would allow a mobile app to transmit location data to an ArcGIS Online map so Public Works management could monitor the location and areas covered in real-time while also utilizing AT&T's WebRTC API which allowed phone calls to be placed by clicking on the map.
After the prizes were handed out and hands were shaken, the exhaustion could finally set in. After two days of solid hacking and seeing developers make ideas come alive it was finally time to relax. Seeing developers realize the usefulness and importance of geographic data made the trip and the hard work worth it.
(John Gravois hard at work)