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Google helps bring Israeli-Arab students and industry professionals together in the first Nazareth Hackathon
October 22, 2012
Google’s R&D Center
in Israel recently co-sponsored Hackathon@Nazareth, a 48 hour long hackathon style event, partnering with
Tzofen
, a non-profit organization that aims to integrate the Israel-Arab community into the high-tech industry.
This Hackathon was the first of it's kind to be held in Northern Israel and the first one aimed to bring Israeli and Arab developers together. For the first time, we got to see the real talent behind the Israel-Arab tech community. Over 60 Arab Israeli computer science students, computer scientists and developers from schools such the
Technion
,
Haifa University
,
Hebrew University
and
Tel Aviv University
got together for 48 hours to turn ideas into reality. During the event, the students finally had the chance to turn their academic knowledge into innovative new software products, experience teamwork and create a new network with both Arab and Jewish experienced engineers.
Yossi Matias
, Managing Director of Google's R&D Center, opened the event with a warm welcome speech to more than 80 attendees. Later on, the students pitched their ideas to the crowd and picked 14 ideas to work on during the event.
The positive energy and the mentors helped keep the participants coding all night long, which allowed them to build web and mobile applications based on their own ideas. Just before saying goodbye, all the teams presented their
project demos
before a panel of distinguished judges from the Israeli
startup scene
who gave them constructive feedback on their demo. Some of the more promising ones were
theFridge
, which allows roommates to maintain their household easily and efficiently and
AroundRoid
, an application that combines task management with location-based services.
Costa Touma, a full-time software engineer at Google who participated as a mentor at the event summed up this experience with the talented students: “The event's highlight was the team spirit. Everyone who participated gained something while at the same time helped put Nazareth on the tech map for a brief weekend.”
This event triggered a greater interest in planning more coding events in the region. Our
Google developer communities
will be planning more events in Nazareth in the future. For more information related to developers activities in Israel, check out our
GDG ISRAEL G+ channel
.
Posted by Efrat Aghassy, University Specialist for Israel
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