As part of the established co-innovation format "Thin[gk]athon", Kiwigrid challenged 21 developers to develop their own energy management applications based on the energy IoT platform KiwiOS from October 5 to 7. The event took place at Universelle Werke of the Technologie Zentrum Dresden (Dresden Technology Center).

In interdisciplinary teams and in a very short time, the participants developed new solutions, which enable users to save significant amounts of energy. The event was supported by Kiwigrid's technology partner Google. With the successful hackathon, Kiwigrid proves how easily and quickly developers – and energy companies – can develop their own energy applications based on the KiwiOS platform and APIs and thereby accelerate the energy transition.

The energy crisis has hit Europe and is confronting companies and consumers with explosive price increases. The demand for energy saving solutions is therefore greater than ever. As a specialist in intelligent energy management, Kiwigrid has developed the energy IoT platform KiwiOS, which enables companies to connect, monitor and optimize the multitude of assets, systems and partners that a decentralized energy system relies on. Based on a transparent and flexible platform as a service model, companies can connect their own energy applications to KiwiOS X via standardized APIs and thus enrich them with more data and functions.

With the "Thin[gk]athon", the Dresden-based innovation incubator of the Smart Systems Hub created a suitable format that gave developers the opportunity to use the diverse possibilities of the platform and to develop their own energy-saving applications in the shortest possible time. The four cross-industry and cross-company teams were given time to do this between Wednesday and Friday and were supported by coaches and experts. In just three days, fully functional prototypes for intelligent energy applications based on the KiwiOS platform and its interfaces were created.

"We were thrilled with the results, which far exceeded our expectations," said Dr. Frank Schlichting, CEO of Kiwigrid. "All teams had immediately implementable ideas on how energy can be used even more effectively in the future, and were able to demonstrate real customer benefits in the process. These are of course valuable impulses for us to drive the energy transition from our core area of energy management. The aim was also to put the KiwiOS platform through its paces. We are proud that our platform passed the user test with flying colors. We were able to fix a few minor bugs directly on site. The Thingkathon was also extremely valuable for us in this respect. It is the proof for all our platform as a service customers who rely on a robust, flexible and secure Energy-IoT infrastructure to develop their own energy applications in the shortest possible time."

The developed applications were evaluated by a jury of six experienced experts from the fields of energy and software development:

• Dr. Frank Schlichting (CEO | Kiwigrid GmbH)
• Johannes Rönsberg (Innovation Management | Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH)
• Marc Voß (Head of Customer Engineering | Google)
• Michael Kaiser (CEO | Smart Systems Hub)
• Mirko Paul (Vice President; Head of Industry Cloud Architecture | SAP)
• Peter Bachmann (Vice President Customer Solutions | SOLARWATT Germany)

The winner of the Thin[gk]athon was team "Time2Change" with a clever integration of the KiwiOS platform into the Google calendar. Second place went to team "ENERLY" – with an app that presents energy data in an easy-to-understand form and uses gamification to provide incentives to save energy. Third place went to team "ENGAGE" for an application that uses light-emitting diodes to help users intuitively understand when it's a good time to use household devices that consume particularly large amounts of energy. The winning teams all donated the prize money to charitable organizations.