Bioversity Hackathon -let's form a team?

#Are you ready to Shake Up the Biotech sector?

The UK’s first biotech pre-accelerator, the competition aims at reaching out to the most driven individuals, hosthousing them with industry and academic experts, and short-circuiting the development of solutions to the world’s biggest problems! Problems ranging from infant mortality to cheaper and more reliable diagnostics to new drug targets. It is a united, national response to Stanford’s StartX and MIT’s Hacking Medicine, joined by cutting-edge partners including London & Partners, MedCity and KCL, and faculty from Harvard, MIT and leading UK universities.

Three day event:

FRIDAY 3RD JULY (1800 - 2230): IDEATION#

• Leading entrepreneurs and innovators will present the most pressing problems in the field of Biotechnology.

‌• Brainstorm, pitch your ideas and form a team with your fellow participants.

##SATURDAY 4TH JULY (0930 - 1800): DESIGNING##
• Imperial College Advanced Hackspace and Gravity Sketch will deliver talks on resources that can be used for rapid prototyping.‌

• With the help of our mentors, your team will work on:

  1. Performing preliminary market research for your idea.

  2. Designing your product or service.

##SUNDAY 5TH JULY (0930 - 1830): PRESENTING##
• Finalize your design and plan out the milestones for developing a fully functional prototype in the future.

‌• Present your design, market research and future plan to a panel of judges who will give you critical feedback on your idea.

‌• The winning team will be granted the opportunity to sit in some of the most prestigious summer school lectures of Imperial College Business School.

#There are limited spaces available so let’s sign up#

I’m not able to make it to the Friday brainstorm, but if anyone needs an embedded programmer or blender modeller for Saturday or Sunday I’ll be happy to help out.

Hi Billy

So I asked the sponsors and they said “That should be fine! I can introduce you to each team on Saturday morning and then you can decide which team to join.” Here is the link for the tickets, let me know if you decide to signup.

Hint: join our team?

As of right now there are only 12 more spaces available! So if anyone want’s to join Dermot and I for some fun Biohacking and rapid development with access to lots of cool toys for prototypes please sign up ASAP and let us know!

@Willybood did you sign up? If not there are only 6 more tickets left

I just did. Plus I should be able to come on the Friday now, so I’ll see you there.

Excellent! One more and we have a full team.

If you can’t make Friday evening’s briefing/pitch sign up anyway and do the hacking on Sat and Sunday.

Hey Billy

Here is the address

Room 060
Skempton Building
Imperial College London
SW7 2AZ London
United Kingdom

Thanks Aabdul, I’ll see you there at 6.
Billy.

I just wanted to say thank you for coming out so SLMS had a representation at the first London Bioversity event! Also congrats to Billy for being on the winning team!! Great job and I liked all the running around you did to get the parts working.

So day 1 all the members of SLMS came up with ideas and pitched them: @Dermot had two ideas in fact, both of them great! Because we all had ideas we all ended up on different teams working with other people but spreading the wisdom of SLMS. If anyone want’s to check out some photos from the event days they can on twitter by checking out the @Bioversityco account.

Day 2 saw some great hard work on the project ideas where one team even ended up completely scrapping their idea and starting all over Sunday morning. Lot’s of technical issues were realized with all of the projects especially the more complicated ones, overall a fun day.

Day 3 was mostly finalizing on how the projects would work and a lot of focus on the presentations. After all was said and done we gave our presentations. Have to say I wasn’t too happy with the presentation feedback format though.

Yes, a great weekend, and we’ll done to Billy!

I think they need to look at how it ended: my experience of everything up till then was pretty excellent. There was one judge in particular who seemed to be a negative force, and it may just be that he destabilised it.

Sorry I wasn’t able to make it. Sounds like it was a lot of fun. I’m up for joining in if there’s another one soon!

@Willybood isn’t this like your project? http://uk.businessinsider.com/doppler-labs-raises-17-million-for-here-earbuds-2015-7?r=US

It looks similar in that you can adjust the filters for sounds from the outside world, but it doesn’t look like it can take in Bluetooth input and isn’t formed to the ear canal.

I’ll make sure the rest of the team knows anyway, thanks for pointing it out.

We’ve been talking to Wen from Bioversity about how we might partner with them in the future.

One possibility is that we hold follow up events in the Makerspace, say on three/four consecutive Mondays, for example. So that teams who don’t have access to Uni facilities can have a more level playing field to carry out some basic prototyping.

Of course anyone is welcome to become a member but this would allow whole teams to spend a bit of time in our environment.

The important thing to note is that it would need an SLMS member to run it, as an event.

So I just wanted to sound out opinion: is this a good idea? Would anyone be keen to take on something like this?

It wouldn’t necessarily be free to attend, we could ask for donations.

Also:we could be a Hackathon venue (not just BioHackathon, of course). Our capacity is only 60 people, but that’s a good enough amount.

Thoughts/suggestions?

I think that’s a great idea. Instead of donations we could have paid inductions on our equipment if you are not a member and don’t want to sign up. Like £10 for the laser cutter, £5 for the 3D printer, and so on.

I would help with being a SLMS member some of the time too.

I think the key thing is this should go on for ages, if it does then they need to consider becoming members, and like you said charging a small fee for inductions and still normal prices for laser time or materials.