Koding Announces Its Second Annual Global Virtual Hackathon

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 10, 2015) - San Francisco-based cloud development organization Koding Inc. has announced its second annual global virtual hackathon, set for December 12-13. Sponsored by IBM, this year's virtual event is expected to draw more than 100,000 participants worldwide, setting a new Guinness World Record and surpassing last year's inaugural event, which set the record for the largest-ever virtual hackathon.

IBM's sponsorship of the event is part of the company's strategic relationship with Koding, a developer community and cloud-based developer environment that allows users to easily work, collaborate, write and run apps -- all within a Web browser. Confirmed hackathon participants will receive an invitation for a free trial of IBM Bluemix, an implementation of IBM's Open Cloud Architecture based on Cloud Foundry, an open source platform as a service.

Registration is now open, and teams of up to five developers from around the world can sign up for this year's hackathon at https://koding.com/Hackathon. During the event, participants will have 48 hours to hack their way into $150,000 in cash prizes. This year's themes include educational games, enterprise productivity and data visualizations.

Koding was inspired to tap the minds of developers all over the world for a second year after an overwhelmingly positive response to last year's event. Koding's 2014 hackathon had more than 60,000 participants from a total of 900 total cities, and more than 500 projects were completed and submitted within 48 hours.

"Last year we set a new record for the largest virtual hackathon. Koding's cloud-based software development platform enables this type of collaboration at scale," said Devrim Yasar, CEO and co-founder of Koding. "We plan to double last year's participant count in 2015. In parallel, we're excited to introduce our upcoming product, Koding for Teams, to the hackathon participants. This new product builds on our current platform and allows teams to create and manage their own unique development environments with ease and to do it all in the cloud."

Hackathon teams, which will be separated into two categories, students and professional hackers, can begin brainstorming, planning and building wireframes for their ideas upon acceptance. However, to ensure a level playing field for contestants, all code, design, art, music, SFX and assets must be created during the hackathon, which kicks off on December 12 at 12 a.m. PDT and ends December 13 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

"We are working with Koding for this virtual hackathon as part of our commitment to promote open-source technology and support the talented community of developers who are dispersed all over the globe," said Sandy Carter, General Manager of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. "Cloud-based open-source development platforms like Koding make it easier to get software projects started, and hackathons are a great place to show how these kinds of platforms make software development easier and more fun."

Hackathon submissions will be sent through two rounds of reviews and winners will be chosen by a panel of judges. Applications will be evaluated using three pieces of criteria:

• Technical difficulty
• Originality of idea
• Ability to articulate and present idea

To apply for the 2015 hackathon and for more information, visit https://koding.com/Hackathon. Applicants who meet the acceptance criteria will be notified on a rolling basis.

About Koding
The Koding platform provides all you need to move your software development to the cloud. Be up and coding in minutes, work on any project and from anywhere. Collaborate with team members using audio-video collaboration tools and share code in real-time. All you need is a browser!