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Red Bull Creation Challenge 2012 is Here!

Redbull is one of the few companies that really do an excellent job engaging the maker/hacker community. Their 72-hour build-a-thon challenges always generate really creative results. This year’s should be no different. Your favorite hackerspace (hint: that’s us!) is a finalist again this year. However, things will be a bit different this year and hopefully for the better. This time, RedBull is coming to the finalists and will be livestreaming the event online. You’ll be able to watch us build, hack, create, laugh, smile and hopefully win.

The nation-wide synchronized creation challenge starts Thursday, the 19th at 9PM EST, and goes for 72 hours straight through the weekend. Point your browser to http://creation.redbullusa.com/ creation to watch the chaos ensue at i3 Detroit and the 11 other hackerspaces, shops, and homes around the US. Press release follows:

GAME ON: TWELVE TINKERING MAKERS CHOSEN TO GO HEAD-TO-HEAD

 

Red Bull Creation Gears Up for LIVE Online Showdown on July 19th

                                                                                                       

NEW YORK – July 11, 2012 – Red Bull Creation, the 72-hour themed innovation competition, is getting its gears going for its second year by announcing twelve teams chosen to participate in this year’s live online-only format. After a stellar performance last year, four teams were invited to compete alongside eight new and enthused teams that qualified during 2012’s “Bullduino” opening round.  These twelve inspiring teams will go on to participate in the LIVE online, 72-hour build on July 19th at 9 PM EST. Their building, tinkering, and engineering around a common theme, announced at the start of the aforementioned live broadcast, will be available via http://creation.redbullusa.com/ and simulcast from their own workshops, hackerspaces, or homes. So, who will win? It’s up to both the public and participating teams to vote. High scoring teams will take their creations to the ultimate stage—the 2012 Maker Faire in NYC.  Winners will take home a prize purse of $10,000 to further foster their creativity. Let the games begin!

THE TEAMS

  • i3 Detroit (Detroit, MI):  Winners from last year’s competition, i3 returns as a collective of hackers, makers, technologists, and automotive engineers that use fabrication equipment like metal lathes and laser cutters to create epic projects like a 16-ft tall, fire-breathing statue made of duct tape, and last year’s qualifier favorite “The Chronotune”.
  • 1.21 Jigawatts (Minneapolis, MN): Another winner from last year, 1.21 Jigawatts is a team of engineers, artists, and bike builders.  They were able to parlay their experience at Red Bull Creation in 2011 into a enterprise that manufactures an innovative DIY bicycle-building jig called “the Jiggernaut” http://kck.st/ymLlxW
  • Tech Shop (San Francisco, CA): Voted the favorite in 2011 by their fellow builders, Tech Shop is a member-based workshop founded on a dreamland of tools and machines, inspiring collaboration from a variety of fields. This team is an experiment gone right, when it comes to building community and inspiring collaboration from different fields.
  • 23b Shop (Fullerton, CA): Last year’s People’s Choice winner, 23b Shop is a loose collection of friends that started building in a garage and graduated to a serious workshop for electronics, robots, and security research.
  • North St. Labs (Portsmouth, VA): A self-titled “weird bunch,” North St. Labs started creating record-breaking car stereos and taser gloves back in high school just for fun. They self fund all of their projects, pick through trash, and rip apart old junk to acquire parts they need.
  • Team Instructables (San Francisco, CA): Team Instructables is an elite team of inventors, innovators, and “no-good troublemakers” that runs the project-sharing website www.instructables.com.
  • Maker Twins (Scottsdale, AZ): Lead by designers and identical twins Mike and Pat Murray, their team builds “big things” for Fortune 500 companies. One of the first groups to be nominated for an Emmy in the area of “New Media”.
  • MB Labs (Chicago, IL): MB Labs is a collaborative, multidisciplinary group of artists who build kinetic objects and devices, along with custom software and hardware.
  • Designated Drinkers (Charlotte, NC): Designated Drinkers is a highly diverse team comprised of engineers and industrial designers, whose specialties range from NASCAR to biomedical equipment.
  • Innovation Thirst (Greenville, TX): This hometown team of mechanical and electrical engineers, designers, builders, programmers and nerdists, are also some of the nation’s most certifiably skilled competitive roboticists. In a nutshell, they like to build robots, drink beer, and build robots while drinking beer.  As their qualifier, the team debuted The Cool Master,  powered with a combination of the Bullduino and the VEX Cortex, a beer cooler that will cross almost any terrain to deliver a freshly opened frosty brew. Cheers!
  • Hack A Day (Springfield, MO): For years, Hack A Day has promoted hacking in any way possible. It’s popular hackaday.com website gets over 600,000 Unique Visitors Per Month.
  • L14E Maker Space (Odessa, FL): The L14E Makerspace Project Team is a diverse group of artists, writers, hackers, makers, and curiosity-driven creators who collaborate to tinker on the daily! Their efforts are a part of the nonprofit organization Learning is for Everyone (L14E), which supports the Curiosity Driven Life.

LIVE IT UP

What fun is making something if you can’t share it with all your friends, real, imaginary, and digital? Tune in on Thursday, July 19th at 9 PM EST on our hacker, mobile, and tablet ready website http://creation.redbullusa.com/ to follow and engage with the live, 72-hour Red Bull Creation build. Explore the site for competition updates, live video streaming, and team chats! Who knows? Maybe you’ll be inspired too.

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LOOKING FOR RED BULL VIDEO AND PHOTO IMAGES??

Through the Red Bull network, hi-res video and still images are captured and made immediately available for editorial use for all media channels including television, film, print, mobile, and digital. The content is centrally located in the Red Bull Content Pool for media partners at www.redbullcontentpool.com. For more information, contact Kerri Holt at kerri.holt@us.redbull.com  or 347-952- 5367

 

Matt:

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