Better Together — This was HACK|BAY 2022
by Thusanth Lingeswaran with Anne Christin Braun
After 2 years, the time had finally come — HACK|BAY was again happening on-site at Z-Bau in Nuremberg — and online for our remote hacking teams. After 2 online-only editions it felt special to be among a high-spirited crowd that was with us to have some fun but also to hack it away like there was no tomorrow.
DAY 1
Up until the start of the first day of our favorite event of the year, we might have been a tad bit nervous. Will the spirit of a live event still be the same like it used to be after 2 long years? Will people still enjoy meeting and working with each other face to face? When the sunny morning of day 1 of HACK|BAY arrived, our hearts still did beat fast but because we knew there was absolutely no reason to worry, on the contrary. HACK|BAY immediately was a vibe. We welcomed almost 180 guests, including 17 great hacking teams who worked on 3 unique challenges provided by our partners GfK, Siemens and adidas. This year they were all about data analytics, robotics and web3. It was great to see and hear all these promising ideas already floating around during the team ideation sessions and we immediately knew: there will be some incredible results for sure.
Because ingenious ideas need a decent foundation, our hackers were spoiled with yummy food so they wouldn’t pass out from all the hacking. There was even a candy bar for the sugar rush. Some of the teams, however, didn’t even take a lunch break as they were already so invested in their projects! After all, they only had a little more than 30 hours to develop full prototypes and impressive pitches! You could even hear the loud clicking of keyboards deep into the night and the steaming brains filled the halls of Z-Bau with an intense working atmosphere.
DAY 2
In the last hours before the semi-finals, our hackers used the time to finalize and tweak their pitches until the very last minute. You could literally feel the excitement because out of the 17 teams, only 4 teams were able to advance to the grand finale — the first-placed teams of every challenge as well as one lucky second-placed team, drawn by lot. These four finalists were then given the opportunity to pitch their ideas to our jury and the audience. Before the big announcement of the winners was made, we had the opportunity to listen to our two awesome speakers for this year’s HACK|BAY. Sheila Beladinejad shared her valuable insights on why “Diversity in AI fuels innovation” and Marlene Ronstedt gave us an “Onboarding Web2 to Web3”. But there was also a very special surprise to be revealed because we designed 100 exclusive ZOLLHOF NFTs for HACK|BAY participants that were raffled to their new respective owners.
Finally, the moment the 4 finalist teams worked towards arrived. The Overall Best team this year is “Perfect Match“ taking home €1.500 in cash. The team with the best technical implementation team was “Biomed” and the best business model was created by team “MetaShoe”, each winning € 1.000 in cash. Time and again we are absolutely blown away by what the teams come up with within no time.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made HACK|BAY 2022 so unique, we hope to see you all in and around ZOLLHOF very soon. In the meantime enjoy the impressions we have prepared for you!
Picture credits: Maria Bayer
Video credits: endlosMedia
