Darwin-based business systems developer Radical Systems has won the 2017 Motorola Solutions public safety hackathon.
Radical Systems won the 48-hour challenge with a solution designed to capture vital data for emergency services while maintaining the integrity of highly secure and covert communications.
The solution is designed to provide better connectivity and communications for public safety organisations, enabling improved decision making and response to major events such as bushfires, and would also enable system users to capture vital data on their devices when they are not connected to the network.
Radical Systems has incorporated the use of Motorola Solutions’ convergence suite of software in its solution design, enabling radio network access to be securely extended to users of smartphones and other devices.
{loadposition peter}The developer was awarded $30,000 in prizes, including $15,000 in cash and credits with Amazon Web Services to further develop its solution in the cloud.
Second place went to a combined team from Mastercom and Battlerz which was awarded a combined $10,000 in cash and AWS credits. Other competing developers included DiUS, Motorola Solutions, Gridstone and a team of New South Wales university students studying engineering.
The hackathon was supported by public safety agencies, including NSW Telco Authority, NSW State Emergency Services and NSW Rural Fire Service, with agencies providing challenge statements based on real operational problems faced by their frontline personnel every day.
“This experience taught us a lot about what emergency services personnel face in their daily work,” said Iain Buchanan, senior developer with Radical Systems. “This really stretched our thinking in terms of solutions design and forced us to consider how technology could be applied to improve safety and productivity within their environments.”
Motorola Solutions’ vice-president of cloud infrastructure Tom Guthrie said Motorola would continue to invest in hackathons and the growing number of services available within the cloud to deliver innovation to emergency services and enterprise organisations.
“Hackathons and the rapidly-growing, common tool sets available within the cloud make a powerful combination.
“Used together, they provide a new way for us to work, share our ideas, iterate and learn from each other. This kind of collaboration is essential to developing much-needed technologies to support public safety and enterprise organisations into the future.”