Sofia Mayor Yordanka Fandakova met today, June 13, with the winners of #BG10xEU Hackathon, initiated by the EC representation in Bulgaria and Sofia Municipality. The 5 awarded teams presented their projects to the mayor and representatives of Sofia Municipality directorates that can assist the projects realization. The meeting, organized by Sofia Development Association, was also attended by the partner companies Upnetix, Deamix, as well as the jury members Iliana Zaharieva, Mtel, Tsvetan Mutafchiev, Telelink, prof. Nikolay Denkov, Sofia University.

The teams-finalists apply the capacities of ICT to establish links between people and institutions, to address social challenges and to empower citizens. "Now comes the time for people like you, said Mrs. Fandakova to the winners, not just active citizens but productive citizens, who from the very start are part of solving urban problems."

The mayor declared the willingness of the municipality to support the realization of the demo projects. "My appeal is to continue together. For me as a mayor these are not prizes for your 24-hour work but an investment in the city and its talent."

The winners received the contracts for their awards from Mtel, Telelink, Sofia Municipality, Webit. Microsoft, also hackathon partner, awarded four of the teams with free services under the BizSpark programme, supporting start-ups with free Microsoft Azure services, software and support for one year. Mtel also provided a special award – mobile phones – for the team with best presentations, while the Bulgarian MEP Eva Paunova-Maydell invited one of the teams to take part in the European Code Week in Brussels.

#BG10xEU Hackathon was praised as a valuable opportunity to generate ideas and partnerships. "We are thankful to the organizers, the sponsors ans most of all to the other participants who helped us a lot with ideas, data and testing." said Dimo Chortov with the winning team Prizma. "In certain applications our idea is better that that of the winning team, therefore the two teams decided to work together on those", added Oleg Kamenshtik with BrainHub Lab team.