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Hacking for sustainability

TckTckTck • February 2, 2012

NY Hackathon 2011- Creative Commons: Elena Oliva, NYU Photo Bureau

Recently in New York, a group of high tech companies, venture investors, hackers, college students and observers like me held the second Cleanweb Hackathon on the NYU campus. A hackathon is a gathering where software developers and serial entrepreneurs stay up one, two or more nights writing code for apps that just may change the world. Hackathons have been held on subjects as diverse as operating systems and disaster relief as in Random Hacks of Kindness.

This app building frenzy in New York focused on the Cleanweb, a concept conceived by San Francisco VC Sunil Paul, to describe the intersection of clean technology and the Internet. As described by Paul and his partner, Nick Allen of Spring Ventures, the Cleanweb is to cleantech — until now a largely hardware type of business — what the Internet was to computing. With many of the big, capital intensive investments already made or underway, the challenge, Paul believes, is to leverage that investment using information technology. And that is what the eleven teams on hand did over the weekend.

At the hackathon the teams developed applications that compared the energy efficiency of every municipal building in New York (www.honestbuildings.com) collected your daily travel patterns from your smart phone’s movement to recommend ways to slim your travel, calculated the cost of installing solar on your home by typing your address into Google maps, notified you or your spouse by email that an appliance at home was drawing excessive power and provided a link to click it off, and turned your thermostat up or down based on the distance of your phone from your home.