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|In: Hackathon|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

HackerEarth, a leader in innovation and talent management software have released a report titled Global Hackathon Report outlining the market shares of key regions and sectors contributing to Hackathons. The report was released at IndiaHacks 2017. More than 1000 hackathons, conducted across 75 countries in the world, from 2015 till date have been analysed for the report.

Image Source – HackerMoon

Key findings from the Global Hackathon Report

Hackathon phenomenon catching on world over

  • Not surprisingly, with 379 hackathons, the US topped the list of countries with most hackathons
  • India ranks second with 105 hackathons
  • The list of top cities had no surprise entrants with London having conducted the most hackathons (31), followed by San Francisco (28)
  • Three Indian cities, Bangalore,  Mumbai and Hyderabad  make it to the list of top 10 cities in the world

Private companies rule the roost

  • Of the hackathons conducted, almost 50% were hosted by Private organizations in different sectors to develop low-cost solutions, fast-track innovative ideas, and encourage creativity among employees
  • Nonprofits primarily conducted hackathons for social good or the environment
  • Public companies and governments use hackathons to build relationships between disciplines, mine data for new useful content, develop new technology approaches, create economic value

Hackathons are not one-off events

  • According to the research around 52% are recurring hackathons with annual editions.

Women-only hackathons are nowhere near enough, but the report did bring a glimmer of hope

  • The number of all-female events almost doubled from 2015 to 2016. The study separately analyzed close to 40 women-only hackathons
  • The report indicates that organizations do understand the barriers—sexism, isolation, condescension, and frustration—women in technology face
  • The  number of all-female hackathons in 2016 was almost twice that in 2015 and companies have begun to recognize that gender disparity has far-reaching consequences and are making a conscious effort to mitigate them

Domains and themes hinting at new possibilities

  • Traditionally, hackathons were conducted exclusively in the IT sector. However, in the last decade, firms in sectors as diverse as banking, food, climate, and health care are experimenting with hackathons to address problem-solving and new ways of thinking
  • Emerging technologies such as IoT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented reality/Virtual reality were among the top domains in the two-year period, reinforcing their positions as potential intelligent and digital disruptors across industries
  • Mobile app and web development was the second most popular domain.
  • The most popular domain and theme is Multi-discipline, which comprises hackathons where people [mostly high-schoolers and university grads] were asked to come together to ‘learn, build, and share’ exciting ideas or creations using any language, tool, or platform of their choice; this category also includes events for which finer details were not made public on their websites.
  • Cloud and data science were also popular domains at the hackathons
  • Payment, geo, communication, social, and music APIs were also popular

Universities more keen on encouraging learning than offering cash prizes

  • It is interesting to note that opportunities from mentors, investors & accelerators/incubators were the most popular form of award at these hackathons
  • Student hackathons were more about learning and innovative thinking, in no specific domain or theme, than cash prizes and sophisticated gadgets. This hints at a culture where today’s academia emphasizes out-of-the-box thinking, providing the students with chances to network and learn
  • Student-only hackathons are open to all students in high schools and universities; some hackathons also permit participation if a student has graduated recently.

The entire report can be accessed here

|In: Digital|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The pitch finale of #BuildOnIndiaStack, Venture Pitch Competition, organized by iSPIRT and Dalberg was close-fitting. With over 180 entries, the selected 12 finalists from diverse sectors such as e-governance, health care, education, fintech, environment and agriculture presented their ideas to a full-house audience.

Image Source – BuildOnIndiaStack

EasyGov that bagged the first position was awarded a cash prize of Rs. 3 lakhs. EasyGov is a cloud solution to help billion people of India to discover the entitlement from thousands of welfare schemes from the Government. EasyGov solution will help in rolling out 10K+ schemes in local language to enable people check family entitlement from phone.

The runner-ups, Journee and Megdap received prize money of Rs. 2 lakhs & Rs 1.5 lakhs respectively. FreeSave and Krishiyog received consolation prize. The winners now look forward to interact with Nandan Nilekani, who has agreed to mentor them for shaping their ideas.

The founders of the winning startup, EasyGov, Amit Shukla and Vineet Sharma said

IndiaStack has created enabling environment for democratizing the government welfare scheme delivery. Acceptance of eSign document at all government offices can make it really big. We thank #BuildOnIndiaStack to provide us a platform to showcase our efforts.

Technology evangelist, Nandan Nilekani who has also been at the forefront of the digital agenda in India said

IndiaStack was being used mainly for Fintech. It however has vaster potential. It needs to be extended to education, health care and skill development amongst others. India Stack provides access to features such as the Digi-Locker, eKYC, eSign, UPI that can re-invent these sectors and make them accessible to the common man. #BuildOnIndiaStack was organized to embark upon this journey and interact with entrepreneurs that would be keen to serve the unserved and underserved. India Stack can be source of massive inclusion for India’s population.

The panel of jurors comprised of stalwarts from the impact and social entrepreneurship industry like Bindu Ananth, Chair of IFMR Trust and IFMR Holdings; Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Partner, Unitus Seed Fund; CV Madhukar, Investment Partner, Omidyar Network; Varad Pande, Partner, Dalberg Global Development Advisors and Sanjay Jain, Chief Innovation Officer, CIIE. The jury had a deservably difficult time to shortlist 12 entries from the total 180+ entries that #BuildOnIndiaStack received.

Bindu Ananth, Chair of IFMR Trust and IFMR Holdings, said

IndiaStack has tremendous potential to encourage innovations for India’s mass market. This eve put the spotlight on a number of such applications & entrepreneurs and will help create more focus on mass market business models

Varad Pande, Partner at Dalberg who also was on the jury panel said

Today’s pitch presentations demonstrate the passion of our young innovators and the potential of technology to serve India’s 1 billion underserved. This competition is the start of a journey to support innovative tech-enabled solutions that “Build for Bharat”. We at Dalberg are excited to be part of that journey.

Jury panel with the winner EasyGov, Founder – Amit Shukla and Vineet Verma

IndiaStack is the largest application programming interface [API] in the world supported by an open API policy by the Government of India. The stack is a new technology paradigm that is scalable to handle massive data inflows, and is poised to enable entrepreneurs, citizens and governments to interact with each other transparently, creating an ecosystem to develop innovative ideas to serve the 1.1 billion people on the platform, specifically the BOP population.

Sanjay Jain, Chief Innovation Officer at CIIE and who has been associated with the IndiaStack initiative said

The strong finalists, and the diversity of entries shows that entrepreneurs believe that they can make a business which meet the needs of the underserved.  This sends a strong signal, which is further strengthened by the interest from the VC community in this event.  I am confident that this will lead to more entrepreneurs and investors looking at the country well beyond the top tier of the economy.

#BuildOnIndiaStack also created a platform for entreprenuers to interact with various partners of the eco-system.  Investment Partner at Omidyar Network, C V Madhukar said

Today’s event brought to the fore the entrepreneurial energy in India that is attempting to solve important public problems. As entrepreneurs think about using the India Stack, investors have an opportunity to invest in companies that protect the privacy of individuals, especially in light of today’s judgement by the Supreme Court making privacy a fundamental right.

The competition was open to all innovations that leverage the IndiaStack to unlock new business models and/or reach previously underserved, new customer segments across diverse sectors such as financial services, education, healthcare and others.

Some core focus areas for the competition also included digital lending and supporting activities, such as alternative credit scoring; sector specific digital services such as health insurance or education loans, skilling and certification, property registration agreements, patient-centric healthcare management; and SaaS platforms ‘As A Service’ that support the development of other India Stack based innovations such as Digi-locker or e-sign providers.

Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Partner at Unitus Seed Fund said

Our priority at Unitus is to invest in startups that can disrupt the way financial services is delivered to the masses. This competition has facilitated that in a big way and we want ventures to keep building on India Stack.

Partners of this event were Bharat Innovations Fund, Omidyar Network, Unitus Seed Fund, CIIE [IIM-A]. Start-up India and LetsVenture were the outreach partners for this inititative.The event was also supported by AwsActivate, 91Springboard and Rise Mumbai.

|In: AI|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

ITC Infotech, a global scale full service provider of technology solutions and a fully owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd, successfully concluded the third chapter of iTech 2017, its annual technology innovation & co-creation platform.  As part of iTech 2017, ITC Infotech organised a codeathon and a startup showcase on July 22 & 23, 2017, at its Bengaluru campus. Microsoft Azure was the official cloud partner  for the event.

At the Start-up Showcase, innovative start-ups from  across the country got an unique  opportunity  to present their solutions in front of ITC Infotech’s global client representatives and senior leadership of ITC Infotech and ITC Ltd.. These solutions, based on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, AR, VR, etc., addressed real-world industry challenges crowd sourced from across ITC Infotech’s global client base, as well as from ITC Ltd.

Two start-ups, inFeedo and Aindra won a grant of Rs. 5 Lakhs for a paid POC each, and the chance to co-develop their solution with ITC Infotech as a part of its go-to-market strategy. inFeedo presented a chatbot that can talk to employees and proactively  identify those who are unhappy or most likely to leave. AIndra developed an AI based-face recognition/ verification/validation, visitor tracking, damage detection to use in machine learning, also, asset review and management.

The codeathon brought together some of the sharpest technology minds in the country  to compete, create & code for complex business applications. The participants addressed various challenges ranging from social chats to jigsaw puzzles to  demonstrate their programming expertise and mettle in technological innovation.

The winning group titled Latch, used Node JS, Django & Bots to create a social chat application. They walked home with a cash prize of Rs. 3 Lakhs. The first runners-up titled Offline Champs, demonstrated how to cache and update content offline using Magnolia CMS on the iOS Platform. They won a cash prize of Rs 2 Lakhs.

The second runners-up, titled: Sparks, created a smart solution for push notifications for all mobile platforms using Node JS and won a cash prize of Rs. 1 Lakh. Special jury awards of Rs. 25,000 each were also given to three promising participants.

The panel of judges consisted of business leaders from ITC Infotech’s partners and global clients, such as KONE, Sutter Health and Woolworths along with senior leaders from ITC’s businesses.

Commenting on the success of the event, Ms Sushma Rajagopalan, CEO & MD, ITC Infotech, said

iTech is not just another technology event but an innovation platform that creates an ecosystem of students, IT professionals, entrepreneurs,  start-ups, technology enthusiasts, clients and partners to create solutions for real business challenges. With each passing year, iTech has grown into an extremely  sought after platform,  inspiring new waves of technological advancements and innovations. This year again, it was successful in spotting the best talents across the country and brought to light the great technology potential of ‘Digital India’. Like each year, we will work closely with the winners and help them implement their solutions and assist them in gaining global market access in an accelerated time frame.

The third chapter of iTech 2017 received around 3,500 entries for its codeathon and 36 teams were shortlisted for the final round of development. For Start-up Showcase, 15 shortlisted start-ups were invited to showcase their solutions at the event as a part of the start-up showcase. Adding to the success of iTech 2015 and iTech 2016, iTech 2017 was another milestone achieved in nurturing the digital ecosystem and bringing together entrepreneurs to celebrate technology.

About iTech 2017

iTech, an ITC Infotech initiative, is an annual technology innovation platform. The platform focussed on leveraging emerging and disruptive technologies to create business-ready solutions, for addressing some of the most challenging problems faced by the industry. For more information, please visit iTech 2017

|In: Hackathon|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

ITC Infotech, a global scale full service provider of technology solutions and a fully-owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd have announced the third edition of its flagship annual co-creation and technology innovation platform iTech 2017. The event will take place at the ITC Infotech campus in Bangalore on 22nd and 23rd of July, 2017.

This year, iTech 2017 will run two parallel tracks, a startup ‘Showcase’ segment and ‘Codeathon’. For ‘Showcase’, ITC Infotech will invite startups to demonstrate solutions leveraging Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cognitive Computing, Automation, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing and Bots, to address specific business challenges. These real-world industry challenges are crowdsourced from across ITC Infotech’s global client base, as well as from ITC Ltd.

Some of these use cases include:

  • Voice-controlled AI devices/technologies (such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri or Cortana) to improve inpatient hospital experience by providing an intelligent virtual assistant to hospital patients
  • Identify patterns in Loyalty customers and drive proactive engagement for Retail, Consumer Goods, Travel and Hospitality
  • Enable personalized marketing [across industries, including Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Goods, Healthcare, Insurance, Travel and Hospitality]
  • Predictive Maintenance in factories
  • Yield prediction for Agriculture
  • Identification of pest [insects, diseases, weeds etc.] through image analysis, and recommender system for remedies
  • Golden Batch Analysis in Process Manufacturing – Control limits for various process parameters and Predictive & prescriptive composition of raw material
  • AI based Trade promotion/campaign management

The Codeathon segment will see 40 teams, shortlisted from the entries received, face-off in a race against time to create code components for complex business applications. Participants can present their ideas across challenge areas provided by ITC Infotech. The event is free and open to all students, professionals, developers and early stage technology startups.

Ms. Sushma Rajagopalan, MD & CEO, ITC Infotech, said

iTech is where young technology disruptors and innovators from across India come together to celebrate all things ‘new’ in technology. Technocrats and business leaders from across our global client base will be joining us for these two days to understand how they can unlock the untapped opportunity within their organizations through the latest digital technologies. With iTech 2017, we will be bringing together some of the sharpest technology minds to compete, create and code, while interacting closely with the vibrant ecosystem of entrepreneurs and business leaders of the future.

An exciting addition to iTech 2017 for technology startups is the ITC Infotech Grant of Rs. 5 Lakhs for a paid POC, and the opportunity to partner with the company in creating a thriving ecosystem to foster technology innovations. With the phenomenal success of iTech 2015 and iTech 2016, ITC Infotech is excited to host iTech 2017 and recreate an innovation platform to ‘Experience Intelligence’.

About iTech 2017

iTech, an ITC Infotech initiative, is an annual technology innovation platform. The platform will focus on leveraging emerging and disruptive technologies to create business-ready solutions, for addressing some of the most challenging problems faced by the industry. For more information, please visit iTech 2017

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Flipkart announced a one-of-a-kind hackathon to crowdsource innovative, implementable solutions from the tech community and concerned citizens, that could help ease Bengaluru’s perennial traffic problem. Termed Gridlock Hackathon, the initiative marks the start of the ‘Month of Innovation’ at Flipkart, a part of its 10 year anniversary celebrations.

Image Source – Flipkart Gridlock Hackathon

The contest will run from June 7, 2017 until June 21, 2017 and is open for technology centric solutions, as well as those that partially leverage technology through out-of-the-box thinking.

Key Highlights

  • Hackathon to crowdsource innovative tech solutions to help ease Bengaluru’s traffic issues
  • Participation is free & open to all
  • Register and submit entries on Flipkart Stories

Ravi Garikipati, CTO and Head of Engineering, Flipkart said

Flipkart was born in Bengaluru as an innovative tech company that has over the years changed the way India shops. We believe in open innovation which means that society at large should benefit from whatever we do as a company.

Gridlock Hackathon is an important part of our 10th anniversary celebrations and we want to engage with tech folks as well as citizens to try to collectively find some innovative solutions to Bengaluru’s traffic woes. The idea is to give back in some way to the city we all love, and ensure it retains the vibrant ecosystem that has been a major catalyst in the growth story of Flipkart and so many other companies.

The hackathon will initially run online and participants can submit tech or partially-tech solutions for macro problems like Bengaluru’s overall traffic, or traffic snares in specific areas like Silk Board, KR Puram, etc. All entries will be judged on parameters like impact, feasibility, scalability and sustainability, and completeness. The teams or individuals with the best entries will get a chance to present their solutions to a panel of esteemed jury, who will pick the best 3 ideas.

|In: Fintech|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

State Bank of India-Collaborative Innovation Centre launched SBI National Hackathon – Code For Bank, an API Hackathon Platform for developers, start-ups and students to put their thinking caps on and come up with ideas and solutions that can change the way banking is done in India. From a technology standpoint, Bank views APIs as a set of micro-services that are individual or a combination of use cases, around which a mash-up of applications can be developed on-the-fly.

Image Source – SBI Hackathon

In the age of digital Banking, SBI is organizing this Hackathon with an objective to invite start-ups, developers and partners to collaborate, ideate and co-develop disruptive and innovative solutions spearheading Indian Banking Technology Landscape. The bank’s effort is to promote an Outcome based Technology Culture amongst Start-ups and Developers with the focus on Developing Cutting Edge Solution for Bank in an agile manner. This will put in focus the Business Value driven by Technologies like Predictive Analytics, Fin-Tech/Blockchain, Digital Payments, IOT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, BOTS and Robotic Process Automation.

In the phase-1, participants can register their idea during 20th – 29th May 2017 followed by Hackathon which will start from 6th June 2017 and ends on 20th June 2017.  The initiative will allow participants comprising a team of maximum five people to develop applications or solutions using only SBI APIs, only external APIs and a combination of SBI APIs and External APIs.

SBI keeps innovation on priority and CODE FOR BANK 2017 [C4B 2017] is bank’s biggest step in launching this platform for start-ups and developers in India. The initiative will a part of APIfication Strategy and Transformation which is developed by SBI Collaborative Innovation Centre to create a Boundary less and collaborative development ecosystem which is Technology Agnostic, Agile and completely Digital.

Today all Emerging technology is becoming API based, Fintech is Disruptive, RegTech for Banks is gaining and everything is on Mobile. Banks have to respond to VUCA world [Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous] and local themes like Demonetization, Financial Inclusion, Digital Payments, etc.

C4B 2017 will help drive both External and Internal Innovation. Developers can quickly get an Application Ecosystem View, learn the Bank Technology DNA and start developing solutions using the APIs available on the platform.

For more information, please visit SBI Code For Bank

|In: Hyperlocal|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

GO-JEK Engineering, one of Southeast Asia’s leading start-ups from Indonesia, have announced the successful completion of its ‘She-Hack‘, a women-only, 24 hour hackathon. ‘She-Hack’ saw participation from over 100 young women, who had travelled from Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, as well as from within Bengaluru. These women technologists created solutions around broad themes that included Mobility, Data Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, amongst others.

128 ideas were submitted for consideration to a panel of judges that comprised senior engineers and executives from GO-JEK India, Singapore and Indonesia. 115 cutting edge ideas were shortlisted by the team of women hackers, ranging from mobile analytics, facial recognition, optimizing data transfer to sentiment analysis and chat bots.

From left to right, second prize winners Divya Choudhary and Abinaya Mahendrian from team Superwoman, Jayshree Anand from team Alchemy, Sapna Jayavel and Janani Balasubramanian from team Nebula

The first prize winner was Jayshree Anand from the Alchemy team, who created ‘App Monitor‘ a sentiment analysis tool, which uses data from social media to pinpoint issues that customers are facing and reports back to the GO-JEK team. She won a Hyundai i10 car.

The second prize winner was the Superwoman team, comprised of Divya Choudhary and Abinaya Mahendrian. Using Data Science and Analytics, the team’s solution ‘Insight Pro‘, helped analyse which locations and customers brought in the most revenue in order to optimize allocation of resources. They won a Vespa Scooter.

The third prize winner, the Nebula team comprising Sapna Jayavel & Janani Balasubramanian designed a solution with Artificial Intelligence connected to a chat bot. Their solution ‘Where’s the Food?‘ that helps people with food ordering in different countries. It uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to analyse the food menu uploaded by the user by taking a photograph with their camera, and then makes recommendations based on the user’s dietary restrictions, allergies etc. They won an iPhone 7.

About GO-JEK Engineering India

GO-JEK Engineering India is the Bengaluru-based product development and training centre of GO-JEK, Indonesia’s largest and most valued start-up. Backed by Sequoia Capital India, KKR and DST Global, GO-JEK is one of the most watched start-ups in Southeast Asia. The GO-JEK Engineering India team comprises of developers, data scientists, designers and product managers who work on product innovation, mining data and crafting consumer experiences. For further information, please visit GO-JEK

|In: startups|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

HackerEarth, leader in innovation and talent management software, is set to host the fourth edition of the India’s largest developer confluence, the IndiaHacks 2017 in association with Honeywell. The confluence is aimed at encouraging developers from across the globe and celebrating the spirit of hacking. Registrations are now open and the event will be conducted in three phases : Phase 1 [online], Phase 2 [offline-zonal] and Phase 3 [offline- final].

Image Source – IndiaEve

The code fest will be a series of four offline hackathons and one online hackathon across 3 zones. Participants stand a chance to win cash prizes upto INR 35 Lakhs. There will be two programming tracks around Algorithms/Data Structures and Machine Learning. These online challenges will have developers solving complex programming problems by using concepts of algorithms, data structures, data science, etc.

The remaining 3 will be hackathons on FinTech, IOT and Artificial Intelligence. These hackathons will see developers build unique and interesting products in less than 48 hours. Hacks will be evaluated based on parameters such as uniqueness of the idea, usability of the hack, code quality, design and other parameters.

The first stage is the Idea Submission & Online Hackathon. Participants can submit their ideas here

Each hackathon will have separate themes. Participants across the country will have six weeks to submit their unique ideas & hacks. The submissions are evaluated and the top twenty teams from each zone are shortlisted for Phase II-the zonal level offline hackathons.

The zonal hackathons will be held in Delhi [North Zone], Pune [West Zone], and Bangalore [South Zone] between 29th July~19th August. The participants will build hacks related to the theme/domain. Hacks will be evaluated on parameters like uniqueness of idea, usability of hack, code quality, design etc. The top five teams from each zone will be invited to the grand finale. More than 200 finalists are expected to be part of the final offline hackathon from September 8th-9th.

The biggest attraction of the fourth edition of IndiaHacks will be the Developer Conference in Bangalore-India’s biggest developer confluence. Along with the grand finale of IndiaHacks, the audience will be treated to a host of talks, discussions, and tech workshops by the biggest names in the industry. The event is also supported by IBM, RBS, HERE, S&P Global, Zoho and Active.AI

Sachin Gupta, CEO and Co-founder, HackerEarth said

It has been four years since we started HackerEarth and hackathons have been an integral part of our community. IndiaHacks is our annual flagship event that has been about recognizing and rewarding the hackers-the problem-solvers among us. This will be our fourth edition and we are aiming to make this a massive confluence. There will be interesting programming challenges and hackathons for every kind of hacker and developer from across the world. Through this event, we are trying to encourage programmers and coders to up their game and bring out their best.

IndiaHacks 2016 was a huge success with 1,43,000 registrations from 1500 cities in 21 countries. The developer conference had 55 speakers from various industry verticals who spoke about various topics ranging from technical to management to startups. Some of the keynote speakers included Puneet Soni, Anand Chandrasekaran, Harish Sivaramakrishnan and Viral Shah among others.

IndiaHacks 2016 also saw two of its winners Pally [Fintech] and IOTRANICS [IoT] start their own companies and get funded.

Senthil Kumar from IOTRANICS had this to say about IndiaHacks 2016

The winning moment in IndiaHacks 2016 was a huge confidence booster and an opportunity to showcase our innovation to the world. Our idea, SaveMom, was selected as best social innovation by Airmaker, a Singapore-based startup accelerator. We are happy to share that we started our company JioVio HealthCare in Singapore.

About HackerEarth

HackerEarth is the leading provider of innovation and talent management software to some of the world’s foremost companies, including Pitney Bowes, Amazon, Walmart Labs, Honeywell, and more. HackerEarth has powered innovation and talent management for large enterprises across major industries such as financial services, retail, healthcare and manufacturing. HackerEarth empowers businesses to connect with developer community to crowd-source ideas into real-life products and helps them assess technical talent for hiring. For more information, please visit HackerEarth