Cincinnati Bell to Sponsor First Brandery Hackathon

March 4, 2015

CINCINNATI, Ohio – The Brandery, one of the nation's top-ranked startup accelerators, will host a 24-hour hackathon on March 6-7 in its Over-the-Rhine co-working space at 1411 Vine Street. The event is expected to draw up to 70 participants.

HackOTR is attracting both students and professionals, including designers, programmers and marketers. The participants will form teams on Friday, March 6, around 5 p.m. and spend the next 24 hours developing products including web sites, web apps, mobile apps, social networks and software tools.

Teams will present their work on Saturday, March 7, to a panel of judges. Prizes include four Dell laptops courtesy of Cincinnati Bell, and up to three months of co-working space at Cintrifuse.

Hackathons are an important part of the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem. They help participants connect with other like-minded entrepreneurs, and resources like The Brandery, which will welcome its sixth class of startups later this year. This is the first time The Brandery has hosted a hackathon.

"The reason we're doing a hackathon is not only to connect tech talent to high-potential startups, but to get the entire community involved in what's happening in the startup ecosystem," said Mike Bott, general manager of The Brandery.

"We hope HackOTR can become a regular, bi-annual event to engage as many people in #StartupCincy as possible."

Sponsors include Cincinnati Bell, Cintric, Cintrifuse, Modulus, Petbrosia, Roadtrippers, Strap, Venn and Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC).

"Today's entrepreneurs are creating tomorrow's Fortune 500 companies. Connecting individuals and resources is critical to the innovative process and hackathons help forge those connections," said Tom Simpson, chief technology officer at Cincinnati Bell, which provides Gigabit Internet service to The Brandery.

"We're excited to be involved in this event and provide the Internet bandwidth to support it."

For more information, go to www.hackotr.com.