Lightning talks and a healthy dose of start-up projects launch Hacks/Hackers Berlin

Germany’s capital Berlin saw the launch of its first Hacks/Hackers chapter last night at co.up in Kreuzberg. Around 40 coders, journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs and curious individuals attended to witness five lightning talks before breaking out into informal discussion groups. Among the speakers, who presented for a maximum of five minutes, was Knight-Mozilla Fellow Cole Gillespie and Thomas Zoechler of Zeit Online. They talked about everything from drone journalism — the latest fascination among cutting-edge journalists — to open sourcing the newsroom, and set the tone for a wide range of discussions that covered mobile news apps, content management, data visualization, breaking news verification and online journalist portals.