Junction 2018, the biggest hackathon in Europe, was held in Espoo on November 23–25th. 48 hours hackathon had 1,300 participants from over 100 nationalities out of 7,000 applicants. Finnish Oneiro participated in Ensto's challenge to improve the user experience of Electric Vehicle chargers – and resulted the highly desired 20,000€ main prize by winning the whole hackathon!
The event was built for 11 tracks such as AI, mobility, IoT and Digital Retail, each having multiple challenges set by partner companies. Overall Ensto had 14 teams participating to its challenges, an exceptionally high number for a "newcomer".
The Ensto challenges were on two tracks:
- IoT: Cut the energy peaks with smart heating solutions
- Mobility: Hack the user experience of our electric vehicle chargers
Mobility challenge winner Oneiro, consisting of Finnish software developers Teemu Taskula, Andreas Urbanski and Ville Toiviainen, developed a very trendy sharing economy solution around EV chargers. The team developed technical solutions with full back-end integration, utilizing machine vision for vehicle license plate identification. Telia's Big Data was used to identify the need for EV charging stations in densely populated areas.
IoT challenge winner PEAKachu, presented an advanced energy management system. Solution included data integration of heating consumption from Ensto thermostats and EV charger consumption information from Ensto EV Manager cloud system. In addition, the solution provided the possibility to control both EV charging and heating for load management so that the local network company does not have to invest in additional capacity.
Participation to Junction was part of the Ensto Flow innovation program that enables Ensto to explore new technologies and services in its business. During Junction, as part of Ensto Flow we published for the first time our API documentation that allows partners and other contributors to start building integrations using our devices and back-end. This is a big digital milestone for Ensto and places the company to a totally new category as a manufacturer.
Ensto's participation in hackathon was a success, and the plans are to develop these and new ideas with the winning teams.
More information from Ville Parviainen, Head of Software.