A year into the company, we took the same logistics expertise we'd built ThreeB IT around — and ran it through a Copernicus Hackathon. Copernicus is the European Union's Earth-observation programme: it makes free, high-quality satellite data available for anyone to build with, from weather and ocean monitoring to land-use change.
The Coding Copernicus hackathons in Germany ran on three tracks — Transport, Green Cities, and Safe Shipping. Transport was the obvious fit for us.
What we built
A demo that fed Copernicus satellite-derived data into a logistics-style decision view: weather and atmospheric conditions overlaid on routing decisions, surfaced in the same kind of dispatcher UI a regional carrier would already recognise. The point wasn't to replace existing route-planning systems — it was to show how cheap it was, with a modern .NET stack, to integrate publicly-available satellite data and turn it into something a dispatcher could use rather than just look at.
▶ Watch the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcP0prL8yc
Why we entered
Two reasons, both honest:
Pressure-testing the stack. Hackathons force you to find out, in 24 hours, what your tools actually do under load and which parts of your imagined workflow you've been over-romanticising. We wanted to know how cleanly the same .NET + Azure stack we were running on customer projects could integrate a totally new data source.
The logistics angle wasn't theoretical. Atmospheric data, weather patterns, sea-state forecasting — these are exactly the inputs a carrier should be using to plan around. Mostly they don't, because nobody has wired them in. Copernicus made the data free; we just had to build the wiring.
What it left behind
The platform sits in our archive — but the patterns it forced us to figure out (consuming satellite tiles efficiently, blending free public data with paid carrier APIs, presenting it in a Blazor-rendered dashboard that a dispatcher with no GIS training could read) all turned into shipping code later.
It also got us our first appearance in the European startup-recognition circuit, which is what got us invited to the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 in San Francisco later that year. More on that in its own post.