VivaTech Hackathon Explores Cisco CMX and Spark

Using CMX (Connected Mobile Experience) to track devices

We had an amazing hackathon at VivaTech in Paris France last month. 10 person teams were assembled with the purpose of using Cisco Technologies to improve the conference experience! Cisco mentors and staff were on site and provided access to multiple technologies for the hackers to use.

The first Cisco technology offered to the hackers was Connected Mobile Experience or CMX. If you’re unfamiliar, CMX is used for indoor location tracking and can do some really neat things! Access points are set up in such a way that they’re able to triangulate a devices location by calculating the distance to the nearest 3 (or 4) access points! In order to provide real data to the hackers, the Cisco team installed over 250 CMX access points, covering the entire VivaTech conference! This CMX installation allowed us to track devices that have either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio that is turned on, not even necessarily connected to the network. This technology can be used to visualize traffic flows, figure out which booths are visited most, or even which booths are visited for the longest period (dwell times)! Check out more about how developers are using CMX in applications for manufacturing, healthcare, retail, hospitality, education, and government. CMX is also being used to make buildings smarter while simultaneously saving money.

The Spark video SDK shines

In addition to the CMX, Cisco was also providing access and support to the Spark collaboration tools! In particular, the Spark video SDK and everyone’s favorite… Spark BOTS! The Spark video SDK can be used to imbed high quality audio-video calling and messaging into any web or native application. Spark is an extremely powerful tool and the video SDK can be used to imbed that functionality where you need it most! Last but not least, we encouraged the hackers to take advantage of Bots and their ability to automate routine tasks and inject contextual content into groups, meetings and conversations. Bots and Bot frameworks, have become very robust and with the help of companies like recast.ai, you can do things like enhance your bot with natural language processing!

Learn more about Cisco Spark
See what integrations others have made with Spark

Team Ciscool’s “Smart Path” app takes home first prize

The attendees produced amazing projects during the 24-hour hackathon, but only one team would be allowed to take home the grand prize of 10,000 euros. Team Ciscool did this by using Spark and CMX to gamify the conference!

They created an application called Smart Path. The application starts by using a Cisco Spark chatbot and recast.ai to create interest profiles of conference attendees and booths or stands at VivaTech. Smart Path then matches attendees with the most relevant content to their interests at the conference!

Team Ciscool used the location data provided by the CMX installation and visualized by MapWise to then direct conference attendees to the booths or start-ups that they’re most likely interested in. Attendees that visit relevant booths will gain points in the app that allow them to win fast track passes to other popular conferences and events. Vendors and start-up exhibitors benefit by getting relevant traffic driven to their booths and reducing the chances of getting lost in the sheer size of the event. What a cool idea!

This amazing solution was conceived and developed in less than 24 hours! and stands as a great example of just what developers can do with Cisco SDKs and APIs.

If you’d like to learn more about what you can do with Cisco technologies, here’s a few options for things you can do:

Learn more about the CMX API

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