Public safety hackathon won by start-up Fleetsu

The Motorola Solutions Public Safety Hackathon has been won by WA start-up company Fleetsu for its platform that coordinates the use of vehicles, machinery and equipment.

The objective of the hackathon was to apply the principles of ‘agile development’ to solve real-world operational challenges faced by public safety agencies.

Fleetsu’s app is designed to help public safety agencies to track where their vital assets and resources are at all times.

While the original prize was for $15,000 from event organiser Motorola Solutions, the Queensland Government also awarded the company an additional $15,000 in prize money. In addition, Amazon Web Services, as one of the event sponsors, provided a $15,000 credit to use its web hosting services to help Fleetsu bring the solution to market.

Participants in the 48-hour hackathon were broken into teams to develop technology solutions that solve problems described by Queensland public safety agencies to improve safety and efficiency for first responders.

Focus areas of the event included developing sophisticated, public safety-grade applications to better managing data sharing during critical incidents; filtering and analysing disparate data sources such as GPS, CCTV and social media to create a clearer picture of real-time events as well as post-event analyses; and ensuring public safety operatives stay connected to the right information at the right time so that better and faster decisions can be made during an incident or emergency.

The hackathon took place at the Novotel in Brisbane, with other participants including Gridstone and SDSI.

Developer presentations were judged by a panel led by Jamie Merrick, Director General at Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation, Queensland. Other panelists included Steve Crutchfield, Managing Director A/NZ at Motorola Solutions, Jon O’Brien, State Manager at Telstra, and Paul Migliorini, Managing Director A/NZ at Amazon Web Services.

Presentations and solutions were judged based on the following criteria:

• Technical accomplishment and design.
• Innovation and creativity.
• Impact — how effectively does it address the customer problem statement and what impact would it likely have?
• Readiness — how ‘market ready’ is it?

Image caption: Fleetsu CEO Jakub Felinski accepting the award with Jamie Merrick, Director General, Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation, Queensland.