Chaos of Liti’s, Fablab Saigon and Newway will be the three Vietnamese teams to compete with over 200 international rivals in the Space Apps Challenge hackathon competition to be organized by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) later this year.

They are entering a global judging process whose results will be announced in May, said the organizing board of Space Apps Challenge, an incubator innovation program under NASA.

At the international event whose date has not been confirmed, the Vietnamese teams will compete with other opponents coming from around the world to utilize publicly available space and data to design innovative “solutions” to a pre-determined series of global “challenges.”

The hackathon competition is part of NASA’s initiative to teach people about space and to encourage open-source solutions to addressing global needs of the Earth.

As part of the event, NASA will open up its data and application programming interfaces to the wider global community to create useful apps and devices for the global populace.

A hackathon is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.

Space Apps Challenge will likely offer a big opportunity to developers and engineers who are fond of interacting with rich data from NASA, as well as people who are very interested in space and life sciences, according to the organizing board.

The event has witnessed steady growth with over 20 national competition locations in 2012 and approximately 80 national competition locations in 2013, the board said on the competition’s website.

For 2014, there were approximately 95 sites, 671 projects and 8,194 participants joining the national rounds worldwide, it added.

National competition in Vietnam

The three Vietnamese teams entered the global nomination list comprising 201 candidates after beating 15 other local teams at a six-hour hackathon competition in Ho Chi Minh City on April 13.

During the Vietnam contest, they defeated their rivals before a board of judges, most of whom are working in the Vietnamese and international high-tech sectors.

The judges were Bui Van Quyen - assistant to the Minister of Science and Technology and chairman of Evolable Co., Dinh Anh Minh Quan, chairman of Dinh Vi So Co., Vo Anh Khoa, of the Academy of Science and Technology of Vietnam, and Peter Nguyen from WebM Co.

The 18 teams showed their best products and solutions at the final showdown at Golden Rose Hotel in District 3 after nearly 50 hours of non-stop preparatory work.

The winning teams were picked as their products/solutions fitting the criteria of the competition including impacts (on the community), creativity, feasibility-sustainability, and how skillful their presentations were.

After being chosen to represent Vietnam, the three winning teams received support from many local sponsors to create video interpretation projects in preparation for the international competition.

The sponsors include many local and international start-up businesses like Habataku, WebM, Officience, Ticketbox, Twenty.vn, Tech in Asia, Saigon Hub, MyProClub, HATC, and Viet Youth Entrepreneurs.

Heavily focused on ‘Earth Watch’

Among five categories of the national contest, most of the products and solutions of the 18 teams focused on solving issues in the category of ‘Earth Watch’, while two on ‘Robotics’, and the remaining on ‘Asteroids’, ‘Technology in Space’ and ‘Human Space Light’.

The Chaos of Liti's team won the first prize worth VND25 million (US$1,200) with their "Glass Earth" project which created a 3D “mashup" to display information gathered from various sources, including NASA, into images and stories about the Earth.

The Saigon Fablab team was awarded the second prize worth VND20 million ($900).

The project that Saigon Falab brought to the contest, “Play It Cool”, was a game designed to collect temperature and humidity data using a smartphone and then send the information to a cloud computing platform via Bluetooth.

The people’s choice award went to Newway with an application to test the user’s knowledge about the Earth and human beings through fun games, with support from NASA data.

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