BlueMix Winners from the NASA Challenge!

During the NASA challenge, we named IBM BlueMix most Innovative solutions.    For the most innovative use of IBM Bluemix per City participating they received $12K of Cloud credit and if the winning team is a qualified startup, they will be granted up to $120K of Cloud credit in addition to up to 80 hours of technical support and assistance over 6 months by an senior IBM Bluemix developer.

Judging criteria
•    Application originality and uniqueness: 25%
•    Usage of Bluemix services and runtimes: 25%
•    Solution completeness: 25%
•    Business value: 25%

Drum roll please .. and the winners are:

Boston: Asteroid Heroes
Alex Huang, Korina Ysabel, and Mohib Hassan
They developed a solution to help classify asteroids.  Today this is a manual process requiring hundreds of hours from volunteers.  This solution provides an automated mechanism using pattern recognition on existing photometric data and then displays the results visually in a graph.  It should save countless hours of manual drudge work.  Used the Node.js runtime on Bluemix.

Carmel: Launch Window
Mr Jarvis works for Software Engineering Professionals service organization providing market research, software developers and operations professionals to clients.  His solution used the Ruby Sinatra runtime and the Mongodb service to provide a website hosting video (the SpaceX CRS-6 rocket launch from Nasa Public videos)) and a social media response mechanism to allow comments.

Glasgow- Tie! Two Winners: Icarus and Lost in Space
1.  Icarus (Javier Herrera) used the Python runtime to deploy a website that allows you to find the International Space Station from whatever location you choose, giving you the direction and inclination in the sky to find the station.

2.  Lost in Space  (Jamie Stevenson, student) also addressed the International Space Station.  They used the Ruby on Rails runtime with a PostgreSQL plug-in to get the Nasa data and returning a visual representation of the ISS orbiting the earth, allowing you to find and get more information on the various station modules.

Irvine: Water Matters
Quan Chau
Used the Node.js runtime and the MongoLab service to analyze data to help track water usage and drought conditions on the planet.

Instanbul: NTD - Natural Threat Determiners
Eray Hangul used the PHP runtime and the mysql service to display a catalog of earth hazards which you can view by type (atmosphere, land, etc) and date.

La Paz: Fanatic Code
Amilkar Shegrid Contreras Castro used the node.js runtime to display set of asteroids orbiting the sun at a distance that makes them a threat to earth.  If you move your mouse over an asteroid, you get details on the asteroid (name, orbital radius, period, etc) and comets that

London- Tie! Two Winners: Space Watch and The Great British Space Race
Space Watch used the Node.js runtime, MQ Light, Mobile Application Security and the Android SDK to deploy a mobile app that allows a user to find objects in the night sky.

The Great British Space Race used the Node.js runtime and wanted to use Cloudant to persist their data, but ran out of time.  Their solution allows you to compare your travel time to the speed of the New Horizons probe currently en route to Pluto (the fastest spacecraft ever launched from earth).

Madrid: Kepler Quest
Carlos Hayek used Node.js runtime, Push service and the sql database to create a game (similar to flappy birds) where you attempt to keep your spacecraft from running into various stellar objects.

Nairobi: eyeSpace
Nicolas Kisundu connected to a cloud hosting service which contained images and audio recordings and then used mysql and twilio services to do some twitter analysis and display all this on the screen.

New York City: FirstHand
Jesse Lee wrote a solution was using the Node.js runtime and the Node-RED service to gather sensor data from a special glove and its android controller.  They hope to expand their use of Bluemix to utilize some of our analytics services in the future.

Noordwijk: Load Interactive
Davide Ricardo, Joao Abrantes, Gil Filipe, Florian Olivera
Used the Node.js runtime, android sdk, watson speech to text personality insights, and the PHP runtime to analyze speech patterns of streamed nasa content (astronauts, launches, etc).

Pasadena: CatSat
Brian Cottrell created a game using the gamification service where you take a satellite view of the earth and identify and discover natural events as they occur in your field of view.

Sao Paulo: Maintaining Life in Space With The Most Important Ogranism Based on a Story From Rivers and Oceans
no details, on-site mentors awarded prize

And finally our Virtual Winner:
Kelana Jaya (Malaysia): canyousee created a game using the Node.js runtime, redis and mongolab to allow users to practice spotting special events (wildfires, volcanoes, etc) so they can then analyze real time feeds from NASA!


Weather Channel and IBM in the Cloud!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/1ElmkY72ZlY]


Coffee Break: Jason McGee, IBM Cloud CTO explains why this is the year of the hybrid cloud!

Cloud is transforming entire industries around us! I recently caught up with Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and IBM Cloud CTO, who explains how cloud changes the way apps are being built and why this is the year of the hybrid cloud.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vhGMeqWF2k]

We'll be discussing more of these topics at IBM InterConnect this week!

 


IBM Loves Developers! Video on our community so far!

We created this video from all the cool things we have been working with Developers!

Take a peek!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xgybj_gRr0&feature=youtu.be


IBM Dynamic Cloud Security: Securing enterprises for the Cloud

I have HUGE news to share from the IBM Cloud team! The IBM Dynamic Cloud Security portfolio has been announced!

IBM Dynamic Cloud Security is the industry's first software and services portfolio designed specifically for securing enterprises across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. This announcement represents the very best of IBM Cloud and IBM Security!

So why is security important to a Cloud strategy? First, we know that Cloud is the infrastructure of choice for data analysis and management. Second, companies need a Cloud solution to remain competitive in the marketplace. With all that data in the Cloud, it has got to be secure!

cloud ibmcloudstats

So what differentiates IBM Cloud Security? The obvious answer is IBM SoftLayer and Bluemix! Both provide a security-rich environment, whether you are talking about single-sign on, security access, identity managing, or data monitoring.

Here's further proof that IBM is uniquely positioned to offer security for Cloud!
security ibmsecuritystats

To learn more about IBM Dynamic Cloud Security, visit the IBM Cloud Security web site. There you will find more information about the product, services and resource, such as a training video and registration to a forum discussion.

Helpful link:
IBM Dynamic Cloud Security -> http://www.ibm.com/security/cloud/


TiEcon: 4K startups, Watson, BlueMix, IoT and more!

I really had a great time at TiEcon this past week. What an event! From my Internet of Things keynote to the Watson presence and BlueMix workshop, the largest entrepreneur conference in the world was packed with a phenomenal array of business and thought leaders from across the planet!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP-T0ijrtuE]

More on TiEcon