During the weekend MOJ Digital sponsored and took part in the TechCrunch Disrupt Europe event.
Heard of it? Well! It’s a huge event that started last year, and serves as a European counterpart to TechCrunch’s original Disrupt events.
It is a startup-centric conference and hackathon where hundreds of developers come together and form teams to build a website or app from the ground up in just 24 hours.
(It’s all above board, and nothing to do with illegal hacking!)
It is highly competitive and numerous prizes from sponsors are up for grabs.
MOJ Digital not only sponsored the event but was also the only non-profit organisation representing the positive changes happening to government services online.
There was a huge amount of interest from people wanting to know what we were doing at the event - which we lapped up, seeing it as an opportunity to share our work with the public and our plans for the future.
Since we are recruiting it was also a great chance to meet potential candidates to join our team.
As sponsors, we were responsible for setting ethical hackers a challenge, with the successful team getting a chance to visit the UK Supreme Court (based just opposite the Houses of Parliament).
Our challenge was for them to come up with something that would help victims of crime - this could be before, during or after a crime has been committed.
We had some brilliant ideas come out of the task, including our own MOJ Digital team coming up with an app called Crime Curious that shows a user’s proximity to a crime scene based on their tweets. Watch this video of it being presented at the event.
The winning team, however, were 3 talented individuals - 1 from the UK and 2 from the US - who created an app called Panic Buster. This was a brilliant idea that enables users to contact emergency help when they're not able to speak on the phone as a result of the crime they are being subjected to.
1 comment
Comment by Ripley Golovin posted on
Go Panic Busters. Great Job!