Considered the biggest hackathon in Portugal, TecStorm, organized by Junitec — a junior company from Instituto Superior Técnico — returned for another edition. This edition brought together young entrepreneurs focused on developing technological solutions to society's real problems.
Under the motto "From Concept to Creation," the 8th edition had more than 540 entries from university students across the country and 110 participants in the final, which took place on April 19th, 20th, and 21st at the Champalimaud Foundation. A total of 28 projects were evaluated, and winners were selected for each of the competition's impact areas —health, energy, connectivity, and sustainable mobility.
Noesis sponsored TecStorm for the fourth year in a row, providing mentoring to the teams of young students taking part in the technology marathon. Since the beginning, the students have been developing their ideas over three phases: Ideation, Mentorship, and Final.
Márcio Carvalho and Paulo Carlos, from Quality Management, DevOps & Automation; Olga Carvalho, from IT Operations, Cloud & Security; Mário João Silva, and Abel Espírito Santo, from Enterprise Solutions, helped the teams define ideas, structure projects, and find solutions.
Talking to the mentors, we understood what was positive about this initiative. Seeing the projects come to life is a source of pride, not only for the students themselves but also for those who mentor them.
Participating for the fourth time, Márcio Carvalho mentored the winning team in 2023. This year, he emphasizes that this new generation is committed and "has the energy to bring innovation to the market", and Abel Espírito Santo completes the same reasoning, highlighting the students' critical sense of society's current problems.
These mentors' main focus is to listen to the participants' various contributions and give them the best foundations so that the project can grow even further. Olga Carvalho recognizes the teams' dedication to bringing new things — "as well as teaching and guiding, we also learn a lot from them."
As for Paulo Carlos, "fantastic and rewarding" are the words that best define this experience that has made him "relive university life". Despite this being the first time he has taken part in this technological marathon, one of his teams - EcoRevive - has achieved excellent results:
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- 2nd place in the "Data-Driven Sustainable Mobility Solutions" category, powered by Grupo Visa;
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- Best Pitch Award in the competition, powered by Microsoft.
Other factors that distinguish this event are the sharing of knowledge and proximity to the academic community. Participants consider it a journey of inspiration, and mentors emphasize the importance of these initiatives for students to gain "a new vision and maturity" when dealing with different components in terms of business and technology.
The winning teams in this edition were the following:
TechWrap (health) - an intelligent bandage capable of informing us about the state of healing of a particular injury through an application that monitors recovery conditions;
Sea2Future (energy) - a maritime unmanned surface vehicle (USV) equipped with electric motors and which can include photovoltaic panels. The aim is to monitor the coast electrically and autonomously.
Florensics (connectivity) - an innovative fire prevention and fighting system that uses IoT to create a network of devices strategically spread throughout a forest area to send alerts in the event of a fire.
Parkz (sustainable mobility) - is an application that uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time parking information, electric charging, and gamified engagement for improved driving.
