Being @Hacknext a Hackathon and Conference to create impact in InsurTech

I was one of the coaches at the sold out Hacknext in Munich, hosted at Kohlebunker, from  7. March – 9. March 2019 and in this blog post I want to share my personal impressions.

From my point of view it was great to see: young people build relevant solutions for the future with the latest technologies on cloud.
Best wishes to all hackers who attended and every success for the future.

Hacknext  includes a hackathon and conference related to the insurance business called InsurTech.

In other words the hackers, attendees and coaches were spending three days in the Kohlebunker for:

• Taking on challenges together, approximately 110 hackers organized into 20 teams
• Benefiting from professional exchange on InsurTech with approximately 60 conference attendees
• Providing valuable support from the API coaches

The challenges

Each of the hacker teams had to address a minimum of one of these challenges:

• Using smart data and its benefits for insurance
• Building the future of digital bancassurance
• (R)evolutioning of the insurance agent
• Rethinking retirement

In the following YouTube video you get a short impression of the great atmosphere at the hacknext:

The winners

1. Team Xmen addressed the challenge “retirement plan with micropayments for young hipsters” 
2. Team Insure IT addressed the challenge “revolution of insurance agent”
3. Team I-Gent addressed the challenge “revolution of insurance agent”

Here is my retweet of Franke-Bornberg , which contains the names of the three winning teams. It is cool and makes me also proud to notice, I was in touch with every winning team as a coach. I am sure more details will follow soon.

It was great to see: young people build relevant solutions for the future with the latest technologies on cloud. I wish all hackers the best and success for their future.#IBM4hacknext #insurance #innovation @_hackNEXT @haraldM64 @Jessieevaline @stereimann @crisanto_miguel https://t.co/gBaK2UUX6I

— Thomas Südbröcker (@tsuedbroecker) 11. März 2019

APIs for the Hackers

A lot of the  hackers took the advantage of the different API providers to build their solutions at  hacknext. The API providers did not only provide the API, they also have hands-on support for the hackers during the hackathon. Here some of the API providers and what they provided:

• creditPass verifying the credit rating of customers
• Franke und Bornberg  comparing contract
• Figo getting information about banking transactions
• IBM Cloud developing and running applications using runtimes, Watson AI Services, and doing rapid prototyping to access the APIs as fast as possible with Node-RED on IBM Cloud.
  For more details you can take a look at my blog post How to prepare for a Hackathon with IBM Cloud?

The two following gifs show how easy it is to access the APIs from creditPass and Franke und Bornberg using Node-RED on IBM Cloud.

It was wonderful to see that young hackers appreciated the valuable personal support from each API coach.
For example, our IBM coach team was available during the entire hacknext and some even during the night.

Hot topics for the IBM Cloud usage during hacknext were:

• Cloud Foundry Apps runtimes like NodeJS and Python
• Watson Studio with jupyter  notebooks
• Watson Assistant building AI conversations
• Push notification integration
• Functions for serverless
• Node-RED rapid prototyping
• DevOps using a deployment pipeline

Fun and Food

I had a lot of great technical exchange and fun with the hackers and API providers. It was great that awesome food was available during the entire hacknext 😉

And for sure it was perfect, being in a great team of IBM coaches at hacknext. Who was on the team? Just take a look at to the tweet from Harald Murgas.

Great teaming a @_hackNEXT Thanks also to our supporting expert team @tsuedbroecker @stereimann @albauer_ @kimmey508 @matthias_biniok @MCBaierlein #qiannan @crisanto_miguel #daniel #benedikt #luisa #juergen https://t.co/J6G0Rz5CtU

— Harald Murgas (@haraldM64) 9. März 2019

I hope this was useful for you and let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

PS: By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.

#IBM4hacknext, #CloudFoundry, #IBMDeveloper, #_hacknext #FrankeBornberg, #figo,  #creditPass