It has become tradition now for us, AppsLab, the OAUX emerging technologies team, that the first thing in a New Year is to fly to Las Vegas, not solely testing our luck on the casino floor (though some guys did get lucky), but also attending to the real business–participating in the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon to build something meaningful, useful, and future-oriented, and hopefully get lucky and win some prizes.
Noel (@noelportugal), who participated in 2013, 2014 and last year, and his team were playing a grand VR trick–casting a virtual gate on a Real neighborhood–not exactly the VR as you know it, but rather, several steps deep into the future. Okay, I will just stop here and not spoil that story.
On the other side of desk, literately, David, Osvaldo (@vaini11a), Juan Pablo and I (@yuhuaxie) set our sights on countering Mr. Grinch with the Christmas package theft reports still fresh in people’s minds. We were team SafeDrop, and we forged carefully a safe box for receiving Christmas gift package. Unsurprisingly, we called it SafeDrop! And of course, you can use it to receive package deliveries other time of the year too, not just at Christmas time.
Team SafeDrop (l-r), Os, David, me, Juan Pablo
In terms of the details of how the SafeDrop was built, and how you would use it, I will explain each in future posts, so stay tuned. Or shall I really explain the inner mechanism of SafeDrop and let Mr. Grinch have an upper hand?
By the way, team SafeDrop won the 2nd place of “Best Use of Intel Edison.” Considering the large scale of the AT&T Hackathon with over 1,400 participants forming 200+ teams, we felt that we were pretty lucky to win prizes. Each team member received a Basis Peak, a fitness watch you’ve read about here, and a Bluetooth headset, the SMS In-Ear Wireless Sport.
SafeDrop won 2nd place of Best Use of Intel Edison
We know there are other approaches to prevent Mr. Grinch from stealing gifts, such as this video story shows: Dog poop decoy to trick holiday package thief. Maybe after many tries, Mr. Grinch would just get fed up with the smell and quit.
But we think SafeDrop would do the job by just the first try.
Stay tuned for more details of what we built.
Nice job! Super stuff. Even if you don’t believe in Santa Claus!