Hack The Home: creating the home of the future

Inventors are gathering at the FirstBuild Hackathon to share ideas and shape their vision of intelligent systems in the home and in business. We’re delighted to support this innovation on Snappy Ubuntu Core, the new version of Ubuntu specifically designed for connected devices and appliances. We hope the resulting ideas find fertile ground and look forward to seeing their apps in the snappy Ubuntu app store!

Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical & Ubuntu

What does the home of the future look like? Perhaps you visited Microsoft’s ‘House of the Future’ (now Space of the Future) in the 90s like we did, and were impressed by the smart fridges with barcode-readers; allowing you to reorder your froyo from the comfort of your kitchen. Perhaps your dream is to create a home that understands your unique style and preferences, or simply to know how hot you like your bath?

These days, the free availability of open source software – take Snappy Ubuntu Core as a great example – means the near future is more sci-fi than DIY. Now, as GE’s company FirstBuild is about to prove, the home is the playground of the inventor, and freely available open source software like Snappy is their toolkit.

We’re delighted to be supporting FirstBuild at its Mega Hackathon: Hack the Home, a special 2-day event, taking place April 10th – 11th, 2015, where inventors will make sci-fi a reality. This unique gathering of Makers, Techies, Engineers, and Artists/Designers will wrangle with a range of platforms, including Snappy Ubuntu Core; sparring to come up with the most inventive and, yet, effective smart home apps.  Apps that may feature in every home within the next 10 years.

And the prize is a good one! First, second, third and Community prize winners of the Hackathon who use Snappy Ubuntu Core to develop their entry, and who publish their software as “Snap” package for others to download will see their prize money doubled.

Canonical will match the prize fund for winners who develop and publish their Snappy Ubuntu Core devices…tempting, right?

Come and show us what you can do. To register for Hack the Home Mega Hackathon click here.

For more on Snappy Ubuntu Core…and plenty of downloads click on the link.