Fredericton-based Blue Spurs is hosting a full-day Internet of Things hackathon today, which has drawn the participation of the biggest organizations in the province.

Blue Spurs, which has received international recognition for its Blue Kit “Internet of Things starter kit”, said in an email that a diversified group from across the province is coming together to work on IoT solutions for the entire day.

The cloud computing consultancy’s first annual IoT hackathon is focused on building IoT solutions to make offices more efficient. The groups that will participate in the event include McCain Foods, Irving Oil, the Government of New Brunswick, Siemens, as well as a range of others.

IoT solutions allow machines to communicate with each other, assess a situation in real time and respond with greater speed and precision than humans could.

“The Internet of Things is one of the hottest topics in technology today,” said Senior Marketing Communications Specialist Mostafa Shaker in the email. “It is changing every industry as we know it.”

He added that there will be 30 billion connected devices in the world by 2020. Blue Spur said its hackathon should help participants to understand what IoT is and how it is changing their industries. It also aims to help them learn how the technology can help to solve some of their most pressing business problems.

In a hackathon, participants are divided into teams and challenged to come up with working IoT solutions by the end of the day.

Earlier this year, Blue Spurs was awarded a 2017 AWS City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge by Amazon Web Services at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Blue Spurs, which employs almost 100 people, entered Blue Kit in the competition, which it developed in collaboration with CyberNB and the New Brunswick government. Blue Kit is a low-code IoT educational starter kit that allows middle and high school students to understand the fundamentals of IoT.

Using technology that complex IoT systems are built on today, including arduino boards, sensors, AWS IoT and Noodl, students build IoT projects to learn the fundamentals in an interactive, fun environment. Each project builds on the previous one, providing increasing challenges that are aligned with school curriculum objectives.