HWTrek recently sponsored the eny Hackathon held January 21st at Galvanize San Francisco – Soma. The event was organized by Quantum and co-organized by Panasonic. In addition to HWTrek, the other sponsors of the event were Neura and Draper University. IDEO and SAP were event partners.

“Through the promotion and event support from HWTrek, we had the privilege of engaging with many creators with inspiring innovative ideas at the eny Hackathon. I’m proud to be part of this creative community of innovators,” said Yushi Nakamura, Business Development Leader of Open Collaboration at Panasonic, where he uses resources and technologies of Panasonic to create open collaboration with startups and giant companies all over the world. Specifically, he is developing IoT hardware with the Japanese company TBWA \ HAKUHODO \ QUANTUM. He is also an expert member of the HWTrek hardware development ecosystem platform.

$15,000 in prizes were up for grabs for teams who got the most out of eny, a user-aware, battery-less smart button.  Neura partnered to provide the SDK for the event. HWTrek CEO, Lucas Wang was one of the judges for the event.

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As part of its sponsorship of the event, HWTrek provided a prize of its standard sourcing service worth $5,000. The HWTrek prize was presented to Ardalan Moazeni of Nova Robotics for “Project Free Food.”

Nova Robotics is a non-profit community service organization with a mission to directly impact humanity’s biggest challenges such as climate change and food/water security. Technology advancement in Vertical Gardening is the main focus of Nova Robotics. Vertical Gardens dramatically reduce the water, space, and energy required to grow food in cities. They successfully designed an air-powered water circulation system for vertical farming that is significantly cheaper, simpler, and energy efficient compared to conventional methods.