ha! might as well have the headline: '12th class student charges his phone from thin air' and then reveal in the article it is just made by placing a battery in thin air...
I attended the hackathon and was a little disappointed that all the prizes went basically to teams who rubbed up the sponsors in the right way. Obviously the sponsors were there to promote themselves but rewards should have been given to innovation and not just how many api's from the sponsors you can mash into an app.
The author is correct. After attending a recent JS conference I didn't notice any of the hartz IV people there but just a bunch of exiles from other tech cities who had moved to berlin for something exotic. Unfortunately this will mean a direct copy of silicon valley as all the people moving here to create the tech boom know nothing else to copy. Would be good if the tech here was a focused on solving real world problems instead of creating the next latest and greatest advertising model...