This is not an ideas contest, more about networking and having fun while learning new stuff. All about execution. After events like these people are always hugely motivated and in high moods. Hard to describe it if you have not participated yourself.

Still 2 previous Garage48 hackathon teams have won investments from Seedcamp, the leading startup accelerator in Europe.

If even 1-2 teams from each event become real startups, that´s a big win. If not, people meet others and it often happens they start other projects after the event based on new ideas. Everybody wins.

I played a test of a real-life Capture the Flag game that used your phones for capturing the flag and others.

Your phone would contain a radar with your distance to the flag, and to catch other players you'd tap a tag button on the app.

It was fun, and I could see the potential. There is still plenty of issues with GPS tech but they were doing some fine-tuning using wifi towers / etc.

In this case, you only looked down at your phone to view radar, otherwise you ran as normal, and that's (mostly) safe. :)

They were. During the pitching night I was seriously considering just giving up on it and going home. Ended up joining a university mate.

In the end I got to exercise some skills not often used, so the net gain was about neutral, but if I return for the next time, it will be with my own idea.

Exactly. It seems like it was written for kids. After all, who would run around in the city looking at their mobile phones?