Penza, 28 February 2014. PenzaNews. All-Russia specialized training on the development of mobile applications “Hackaphone#Penza” started its work in the high technology park “Rameev” on Friday evening, February 28. “Hackaphone” is implemented by Mdday project with support of WOW Event. Co-organizers are the Center of cluster development of the Penza region and the association of software developers “Secon.”

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According to the founder of Mdday project Mikhail Denisov, Penza became the seventh city in the “Hackaphone tour” in Russia and the CIS.

“Hackathons have already been held in Moscow, Odessa, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk and Voronezh, and Penza is probably the smallest city where “Hackaphone” has ever been held, but judging by the list of participants, it is going to be quite a large event. It was the Center of cluster development of the Penza region that initiated the event here,” Mikhail Denisov told news agency “PenzaNews.”

Explaining the objectives of the event, the agency interlocutor indicated several types of participants of “Hackaphone”: young programmers willing to bring to life some idea for mobile platforms already operating in the market, as well as digital artists.

“As for the artists, they create installations using the code. For example, at the recent Moscow hackathon, the team that won created a three-dimensional model of a person composed entirely of flying birds, that is, the human body moved obeying to the laws of the flock,” Mikhail Denisov explained.

In addition to the representatives of Penza IT cluster, who formed the majority of the participating teams of “Hackaphone,” five more people came from Moscow development studio “Team4Dev.”

“We came from Moscow to Penza especially to present not only a mobile application, but interactive advertising unit. We will present an advertising screen, and each participant of hackathon can interact with it using a mobile phone — simply go to the website and participate. Thus, we are trying to create a new kind of online advertising, unique in the world yet. At the same time, our team is trying to move away from some complicated technical things to a simpler form. In addition, we would like to monetize our application, that is to turn the code into real money, and to tell you a secret, I think we'll manage to do that right this weekend,” the representative of “Team4Dev” Kirill Chuvakov noted.

Evaluating the level of Penza colleagues, the capital’s representative noted that it was not lower than that of the Moscow.

“Here in Penza you have some very cool companies, interesting startups which we use ourselves. I doubt that Penza specialists are less qualified than Moscow ones,” Kirill Chuvakov said.

During the official opening ceremony of “Hackaphone#Penza,” the head of the department of innovative policy and special projects of the government of the Penza region Pavel Udalov wished good luck to the participants.

“Dear friends, I am pleased to welcome all of you today, and I hope that you will be comfortable working here — we tried to create all the necessary conditions. As for the results, I wish you that on Monday one of the applications that will be created here these days, exploded the Internet,” Pavel Udalov said.

According to General Director of JSC “Center of cluster development” Mikhail Lyashkov, during the next 48 hours, the jury, experts and mentors of “Hackaphone” will be the founder Mikhail Denisov Mdday project, the leader of Penza association of software developers “Secon” Maksim Semenkin, Vladimir Rozov (Bit.Games), Vladimir Zakoulov, Anton Sergeev, Alexei Grigorkin (Flysoft) and others.

“The regional manager of cooperation with Google developers Dmitry Martynov will be with the participants remotely. In addition, Google presents a special nomination for creative developers at “Hackaphone” — DevArt,” said the agency interlocutor.

After three days of work in the industrial park “Rameev” the winner of “Hackaphone#Penza” will have an opportunity to participate at super final “Hackaphone,” which will be held during the festival of mobile technology Mobilefest in Moscow in March 2014.

Hackathon (derived from two words “hack” and “marathon”) is an event during which experts from different areas of software development (programmers, designers, managers) are working together to solve some problem.

Currently hackatons are no longer related to hacking, but are conventional programming marathons that last from one day to one week.

Some hackathons are designed for educational or social purposes, but mostly the hackathon objective is to create a full-fledged software. Each hackathon is focused on a specific area, such as programming language, operating system, application, and program interface (API).

The term appeared in 1999. It was independently used by the developers of OpenBSD and Sun Microsystems.
OpenBSD developers first used the term to describe the meeting devoted to cryptography in Calgary (Canada), June 4, 1999. 10 developers came there to write programs that would not fall under the strict export restrictions imposed by the U.S. on cryptographic software.

Sun used the name “The Hackathon” during JavaOne conference held from June 15-19, 1999. John Gage offered to write a program in Java programming language for the new Palm V, which would use the IR port to communicate with other users of Palm.

Since the mid-2000s, hackathon became more common and was considered by companies and investors as a way to quickly develop new software technologies or areas of investment. Some well-known companies were created on a hackathon, for example, GroupMe, appeared on TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon conference in 2010, and in 2011 it was bought by Skype for 85 million dollars.