By Nathan Luck
The team behind Forecasting Using Prediction Markets has taken line honours at the 2011 SAP InnoJam, a new Australian innovation competition that brings together technology, business and industry experts to develop new technology prototypes based on the SAP ecosystem.
Announced on the final day of the Sydney-based SAUG Summit (August 2-4), the FUPM team earned a spot at the prestigious SAP TechEd Demo Jam (September 13, Las Vegas) for their development of a prototype designed to assess the success of new products based on internal employee feedback and external social media monitoring.
Taking place on July 30-31 at the University of Technology, Sydney, InnoJam was SAP’s first-ever Australian innovation competition. The event was facilitated by SAP Research who provided technical support, arranged access to SAP prototypes for use by the participants and arranged a keynote speech and judges for the event.
Over the course of the non-stop 30-hour event, around 40 participants formed five teams, each developing a prototype application using a range of available, and soon to be available, SAP technologies. These included HANA, Sybase Unwired Platform, SAP Network Gateway, Gravity and SAP Research’s Holodeck project.
Each team was then given six minutes to present its concept to the panel of judges to see which three ideas would be presented to the panel at SAUG.
The team members were made up from a diverse group of individuals which literally worked through the night developing their prototypes to present to the judging panel, consisting Professor Bernhard Wieder, UTS Business School, Dr Karsten Schulz, SAP Research and Grahame Reynolds, SAUG.
The top three teams from InnoJam, Mad Doc, Cibernators and Forecasting Using Prediction Markets presented at SAUG. The prototypes focused on document code for lazy programmers, disaster management and crowdsourcing respectively.
“I got to use beta products like Gravity, had access to Holodeck, and was able to spend half a day on HANA,” said Tony de Thomasis from Acclimation, who was a member of the winning team. “We single-handedly loaded half a million records into HANA and learnt as we went. The SAP experts at the event were amazing and the amount of knowledge we gained during the 30 hours was incredible.”
