Perhaps the most exciting thing about IoT is that everyday uses don’t always reveal themselves right away. Sometimes they need to be coaxed out. By experimenting at the edges of what’s possible with modern APIs, the hacker community gets to define those possible uses and parameters. At Hackendo, this past weekend’s wearables-and-externals IoT hackathon, I could see sparks flying everywhere – and you never know what might set the forest ablaze.

By Sunday afternoon, the teams at Hackendo were in full crunch mode. The hackathon had raged for two days, and now everyone was blitzing at the SF Techshop in SOMA to prep for 8PM demos and pitches. This was a room of people ready to break things and make things up as they went along. T-shirts with slogans like “Free Software Free Society” could be seen around the room.