Looking forward to Hackference 2017

I'm very proud to announce that for the third consecutive year, Microsoft are sponsoring Hackference 2017.

What is Hackference?

Hackference is an annual developer conference/hackathon event held in central Birmingham organized by Hoopy and the wonderful Mike Elsemere.

It is always a fantastic event; the speaker line-up looks amazing this year and i'm sure there will a lot of awesome projects born at the hackathon over the weekend.

Self-driving AI-based Raspberry Pi cars

Last year, we awarded our main prize to a team who created a fully autonomous self-driving radio controlled car using Microsoft Computer Vision APIs running on a Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 IoT Core.

We are looking forward to seeing if anyone can do better this year!

Sonos Play 1 in exchange for an awesome AI hack

This year we'll be inviting hackers to use our Cognitive Services and/or Bot Framework to create somethings amazing.

Specifically, we'll be looking for

• Creative and interesting use of Microsoft Bot Framework and/or Microsoft Cognitive Services
• Creation of a project that is likely to be continued to real-world production
• Creation of a functional project that works within it intended scope

We'll be giving away a Sonos Play 1 to each member of the winning team.

Get started with Azure

In order to use Cognitive Services and/or the Bot Framework you'll most likely need an Azure subscription to help with hosting and provisioning of services.

You can always create an Azure Free Account but that will require credit card details to get started (it is free, but need details for verification). If you'd prefer not to use your credit card details, we have some special Azure Passes which you can claim at http://aka.ms/AzurePassManager, look out for some communications (probably an email or slack message) from the Hackference organizers about how to claim you code.

Who's going to be there from Microsoft

This year I'll be joined by Maria Vrabie.

Maria and I will both be there for most of the hack weekend to help you get started with your projects and answer any questions you may have. I'll be there for the conference on Friday too.

I'm really looking forward to Hackference this year, I'll see you there