IS students and faculty members participated in SAP TechEd Meetup in Palo Alto, on October 21 & 22, 2013.
In addition to attending various presentations and demos on Connected Car and SAP Hana Cloud Platform, students joined several Hack teams to develop hands on solutions to solve real-life business challenges.
Two students, Jeff Carpenter and Mina Guirguis, hacked with their team continuously for 24 hours. Their team created a social network car-pooling app that utilized Ford OpenXC API and SAP Hana technology. The mobile app sends notifications to a mobile phone when a car driver exceeds the speed limit in real time.
Mina Guirguis explained his experience as:
"On the final day, Oct. 22, an hour before the show case session, the team finally succeeded to get the app to function on an Android phone. We had a chance to test our app live while driving in a Ford car. The mobile app showed its success when the driver exceeded the speed limit--the registered phone number got a notification with the safety issue in real time.
"During the presentation, we gave an Android phone to the judges to see our app live. The judges were impressed that we succeeded to develop a functional app in 24 hours. Five groups participated in the competition but none of the other teams were able to develop a functional app due to the time constraint. Ten minutes after the presentation, the judges announced that we were the winners. Jeff and I were the only two students who participated in the competition.
"Overall, I have learned a lot about SAP. It was a fascinating experience for me. I had a chance to work closely with SAP developers. They worked with us all day till we did our presentation."