Hackathons are meetups where developers from across technology domains come together to form teams and build a product in a certain time frame. Very good for the ecosystem as a whole, hackathons serve many purposes ranging from building more products (some of which might go on to become hits) to creating a talent pool for startups to hire from.
GSF accelerator recently conducted the #GSFhacks, a 30 hour Hackathon starting on April 20. This hackathon had onboarded technology partners- Datawind, Rovolt Labs, PayTM, Indiamart and Intuit – who gave broad problem satements for the developers to work on.
100 developers were selected via a filtering process and they went on to code for 30 hours to come with solutions or cool hacks to the problem statements defined by the technology partners. Here are the winners selected by the respective companies:
Shine.com
Product: Register for Shine.com through mobile using IVR and social network
Team: Anmol Ahuja, Hammad, Pankaj Kumar Sharma, Umar Ahmad
Indiamart
Product: Advanced autocorrection and NLP based searching tool to get desirable products from e-commerce catalogs
Team: Ravi Suhag, Manish Singh Bisht, Amit Saharana
Rovolt Labs (announced 2 winners)
Product: Run up :Social running with your friends regardless of location
Team: Agam Jain, Vipul Jain, K. Balakrishnam
Product: Geo fenced public photosharing
Team: Sudhanshu Pratap Singh, Aviral Aggarwal
Datawind
Product: Social education platform for Android device
Team: Mohammad Umair, Saurav Tomar, Abhinav Sinha, and Arnav Gupta
Paytm
Product: Offline payments via PayTM using sms
Team: Rajat Srivastava, Ankil Gupta, Dharmendra Pratap Singh
GSF (announced 2 winners)
Product: Live captions during conversations targeted at hearing impaired
Team: Kshitij Kumar, Raghav Sood
Product: Browser extension for productivity analytics
Team: Cheenu Madan, Gaurav Verma
18 winners received INR 5000 and a datawind tablet each. These products are yet to be deployed but have the skeleton is in place. From here on, the teams can either decide to develop on their products themselves or the technology partners will work with the developers to build on some of them further.
Read the story at http://yourstory.com/2014/04/gsfhacks/