Las Vegans win tech competition with Walk Off app
If tweets are an indicator of success, VegasTech has done well.
This past weekend, nine Las Vegas developers traveled to Palm Springs, Calif., to participate in Code 4 Health, a competition to create health-conscious apps, judged in part by Chelsea Clinton.
A team of four from Las Vegas won with Walk Off, a free app that measures short distances driven and converts them into steps a user could have taken. To create Walk Off, the team combined Automatic, an app that measures driving habits, and Jawbone UP, a bracelet that tracks activity and sleep habits.
An equally exciting accomplishment was generating buzz about Las Vegas’ tech scene, said Porter Haney of the winning team, which included Justin Johnson, Chris Moody and Brendan Nee.
“A bunch of people from outside Vegas were tweeting about us,” Haney said.
Among them were Clinton, who mentioned Walk Off to her following of 393,000, and John S. Bracken of the Knight Foundation.
“One of the highlights of #code4health was that Las Vegas really brought it — at least 2 of teams from the city that @zappos built,” Bracken tweeted Jan. 14.
Haney and Jimmy Jacobson, co-founders of Wedgies real-time online polling, said Las Vegas turned out in better numbers than larger cities.
Of the 20 or so participants, about half were from Las Vegas. The others were from New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Contact reporter Kristy Totten at ktotten@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3809. Follow @kristy_tea on Twitter.
