YC and Morpheus backed HackerRank launches CoderTrophy- A nationwide programming contest for colleges

We wrote about InterviewStreet back in October 2009 when they had just started their journey and since then, they've come a long way. They've even conquered the White House! A Morpheus Gang company that went on to raise funding from Khosla Ventures, Start Fund, SV Angel and ZenShin Capital, also underwent acceleration at YCombinator.

Interviewstreet is primarily for companies to screen programmers and hire better. And as a part of the whole mission, they launched HackerRank to create a community of programmers in different domains of Computer Science. "Our goal at HackerRank is to build a community of problem solvers in different domains like AI, Machine Learning, Databases, etc through solving programming challenges from a beginner to real-world problems. We're starting off with Artificial Intelligence game theory challenges starting from as simple as a bot-clean to a complex ones like Anti-chess," explains Vivek Ravishankar, the co-founder at InterviewStreet. (InterviewStreet and HackerRank are like Google maps and Google mail in terms of terminologies but the only difference is that they don't have a parent name like "Google").

And marching towards the motive of HackerRank, they have launched CoderTrophy- a nationwide programming contest exclusive to Indian colleges. "We've got over 2500+ students registered for the contest and growing at the rate of 150-300 every day," informs Vivek.

The contest starts on Feb 1st and is a 24-hour contest. Apart from ipads and flipkart gift vouchers, the winner gets an office hour with Jawed Karim (founder of Youtube!). "The whole motive behind the exercise is to build the hacker culture in different colleges in India," concludes Vivek.

For a growing startup ecosystem like India, such steps will go a long way in spreading the awareness amongst youth about entrepreneurship. We are starting to see success stories and these entrepreneurs are willing to put some efforts back into the system from where they arose which is a heartening sight.