[Post Event] Cluj City Apps Hackaton 14-16 March 2014

This weekend in Cluj-Napoca we had the first hackathon based on public data offered by Cluj-Napoca City Hall. There were a lot of public data that could be used to create different application. For example people had access to data related to parking slots, how European funds are used and so on.
This event was organized by Cluster Cluj IT in collaboration with Microsoft Romania, Cluj-Napoca City Hall and hosted by City Hub. At this event I was invited as mentor and to be part of the jury.
I saw a lot of great ideas that could be used in everyday life to improve our life. There were a lot of application around maps and putting different data on the map. A lot of teams tried to add content to the map and on different graphical reports.

BEGIN OFFTOPIC
A small hint for all teams for the next time when they have an idea related to this. Try to look on the internet and find out what kind of frameworks you can use in your application. THE internet is full with free stacks and application that can be used for this scope. It is better to be an integrator of different services and frameworks than to develop an application from scratch (cheaper, fuster and better).
For example, Office 365 BI Power Tools give you the possibility to make queries over data, filter them, put this data on the map, create complex models using pivots and different views and many more.
END OFFTOPIC

It was pretty great to select what application is the best. I hope that in near future to see all of them online or in the store, especially because the city hall said that they will substation them. I would really enjoy using all of them in real life. The quality of people life from Cluj-Napoca would be improves a lot if all this application will be published.

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