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 – including Learning is for Everyone’s LI4E Makerspace Team! – 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 www.redbullusa.com/creation 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
The competition is considerable – in talent and creativity! Participating teams are:
- 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. - LI4E Maker Space (Odessa, FL): THAT’s US!!! 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.
What we know so far
We got a cool Red Bull Iceman Cooler via FedEx the other day, and understand some Red Bull to stock it with follows shortly, presumably to keep ourselves awake for this marathon of creativity. Beyond that, we’ve got just a sprinkling of hints of what’s to come this week, as Learning is for Everyone’s LI4E Makerspace team, the South’s lone competitor, prepares to go head to head with some amazingly talented creatives. What we’ve learned so far…
- Camera and microphones will be delivered between Monday and Tuesday
- On Wednesday evening, we’ll all be testing the webcams and the live feeds and Red Bull will be testing the streaming telecaster from their studio.
- Thursday, July 19, at 7 PM EST all teams turn their webcams on for final testing and trouble shooting and then – drum roll please! – at 9 PM EST, the whole thing goes live with “Team intros/Shenanigans/Topic Announcement Ceremony and the 72 hour RBC challenge begins.”
- Sunday night, July 22, at 9 PM EST, “tools down!” A streaming show and tell will give each team an opportunity to talk about what we created and how, and then teams vote for the Team Choice Award, worth $5,000.
- Monday, July 23, we submit three photos, a short text description and a 1 minute video describing our creation.
- Wednesday, July 25th, Red Bull will publish a website featuring all the final Creations with descriptions and the public can then vote for their favorite Creation, for the People’s Choice Award, also worth $5,000.
World Maker Faire 2012
The top 3 Teams from the People’s Choice Award and the winner of the Team Choice Award will be flown to New York to the World Maker Faire in September to display their final 
Creations. Red Bull will cover flights and hotel and food for 4 people from each team (2 double-occupancy rooms per team), as well as shipping costs to transport the winners’ Creation to and from New York City. If the Team Choice is a winner in the top 3 of the People’s choice, then it becomes the top 4. Creations and 4 team members
What You Can Do
Tune in on Thursday, July 19th at 9 PM EST on our hacker, mobile, and tablet ready website www.redbullusa.com/creation 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! And when the People’s Choice Award voting opens up – VOTE!!
We’ll be working hard to earn your vote, and to showcase what people of all ages can do with the freedom to create and the right tools and spaces in which to be creative!
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