Proxama offers £10k kick-starter prize at Isobar Create London event

13 Mar 2012

LONDON, UK: The UK's first NFC hackathon - "Isobar Create London" - together with O2, will award one winning team a £10 000 (about R120 000) kick-starter fund courtesy of Proxama, a leading developer of near field communication (NFC) proximity marketing technology.

Digital communications agency Isobar have teamed up with O2 to launch the UK event which builds on the success of previous Isobar create events in Boston and San Francisco. Isobar Create London will be held over a 36-hour continuous period from 8am on Saturday 24 March to 8pm on Sunday 25 March. Up to 100 developers and designers are expected to descend on Shoreditch Studios in London to meet the challenge of creating new uses for NFC mobile phone technology.

To turn their ideas into fully designed executions, competitors will be invited to use Proxama's TouchPoint NFC marketing platform. TouchPoint is a web facility that is designed to enable developers to build a fully branded NFC campaign with the ability to track and evaluate campaign activity.

Looking for ideas that are commercially viable

To be in a with a chance of winning the Proxama prize, competitors will have to use its TouchPoint platform to demonstrate an idea that the judges feel is commercially viable and addresses a market opportunity that can be deployed in the next 12 months. Proxama's prize will be the provision of the technical and commercial support, worth up to £10 000, to turn the original idea into a commercial proposition that can be taken to market.

Neil Garner, founder of Proxama, will be on the judging panel. He said: "Now that NFC technology is becoming more accessible, events like this that encourage experimentation and familiarisation with it deserve to be supported. Being at the heart of the NFC revolution, we are very keen to promote the use of NFC as a key marketing tool, so we're delighted to be able to make available our TouchPoint marketing platform for this event and to offer a prize of real commercial value to the winners of Isobar Create London. I am really looking forward to seeing the diversity of ideas that I am sure the competitors will develop."

Dom O'Brien, head of Innovation at Isobar UK said: "Isobar Create London will bring the UK's most talented developers and designers together to pioneer new uses of NFC. We're really excited to have Proxama involved in the event and make the TouchPoint platform available to help participants build their NFC solutions."

As well as the competitive element of the event, competitors will also be able to hear from keynote speakers including Brendan Marry, lead NFC engineer, Google Europe. Find out more at www.isobar.com/createlondon and find out more about Proxama at www.proxama.com.