Coding away to glory at InMobi Hackday
Hackathons are probably the best way to get creative with code, apart from the fact that they bring together a brilliant peer group who are all equally to code their ideas to glory. Being in Bangalore one gets to witness Hackathons every week (YourStory has one this Friday too). Almost all big companies have their own hackathons, be it Google, Yahoo or Flipkart. Last Saturday, it was InMobi's turn. The mobile advertising company's campus was buzzing as techies geared up for the annual Inmobi Hack Day. This was InMobi's second hackathon this year, after its FreedomHack in memory of internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz.
The main theme of the hackathon was analytics for the social sector and cloud. The jury included Ravi Gururaj - Chairman of NASSCOM Product Council, Namit Jain - Head, Nutanix India, Manu Kumar Jain - Head, Xiaomi India and Krishnendu Majumdar, who heads the Product for Publisher monetization, Inmobi Exchange and The User Platform.
Highlights:
- Over 520 people signed up for the hackathon and 332 participants were selected based on their ideas.
- Over a 100 teams were formed out of which 23 percent were InMobi's own employees.
- Only 20% of the participants were students, major participation came from professionals.
- Flipkart and Cisco had the highest representation, companywise.
The winning hack was from the team Green Hackers which came with the app Chaatall, Chataall allows people to send messages in their local language, the app would translate the message in the receivers language, thus removing the communication barrier due to languages.
Here is a demo of the app.
The team walked away with a Nexus 5.
The runner up team was Occam's Razor which built an assistive app for autistic kids. The app works with a wearable device which would be able to detect and record physiological signs of stress and excitement and then notify the caregiver, saving them the constant worry of monitoring the child. The team won the Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch.
Team Serial hackers were the second runner up. Their idea was also quite unique. An app which would simplify shopping for lipsticks. It removes the pain of applying different shades and then removing them each time to try out the new one. With their app you just have to take a selfie and then a photo of the shades. You can apply them one by one on the picture and see how you look, share the picture on the WhatsApp to get the opinion of your friends and then you can go ahead and buy them.
A brilliant use case of the app could be by integrating it on ecommerce sites and with stores.
Mohit Saxena, co founder and CTO - InMobi said, "Before we had Hackathons only for InMobi employees, the first time when we did a hackathon we realized you have more fun when you do it with the community and you get lot of other ideas. This time we said hey why not lets have InMobi and then battle it out with other guys. so we opened it up for everyone and hopefully that's how it is going to stay."
