Developers were invited to hack on APIs of six of our portfolio companies - Cloudinfra, Frrole, Native5, Nanobi, NowFloats and SupportBee. Developers got access to the latest and most innovative technologies being developed by these companies. All the company co-founders were around to help and advise the hackers.
“Our objective was to enable developers with working knowledge of HTML5 to create applications across platforms. Over the course of 6 hours, Native5 Platform successfully enabled three group of developers, not just to create but deploy applications on desktop and mobile,” said Kunal Abhishek, co-founder of Native5.
We used HasGeek’s Hacknight platform for registrations and the free event was oversubscribed within days! There were 200 subscriptions for the event – 65 per cent of the participants were students and 35 per cent were a mix of young professionals. The event started early in the day. After a brief introduction to each of the six companies’ APIs, the developers made their choices, split up into teams of about 3-5 people each and started hacking soon after.
A total of 17 teams were formed – the overall enthusiasm on the floor was very high. None of the teams were seen dropping out or slacking off at any time. Including a short lunch break, the teams were hacking non-stop till 6 pm after which they presented their hacks to our team of judges-- Pradeep Banavara, Technology Lead at Microsoft Ventures, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Founder of HasGeek and Mrinal Jain, Integrated Systems Sales Specialist and Cloud Computing expert at IBM. Each hack was evaluated on the following criteria--technology, design, value proposition, inspiration and completeness. Finally, after several rounds of debate, the judges picked five winning hacks while a sixth almost made the cut. These six are:
Aman – Frrole and Facebook APIs to collect and gather relevant sentiments and overlay this on top of a video ad. This was a shoo in by all the judges and all three chose this team. Their idea was very strong, their hack was complete, and the demo very compelling with live overlay of social media feeds over live video.
Python Wrapper for SupportBee – Automate the complete ticketing workflow using Python. This was also a shoo in by all the judges. Though a very simple idea, their hack was complete and eminently useful. The judges also wanted to reiterate an important aspect of hacks is the willingness to build on top of a basic set of APIs to enhance the usefulness and sophistication.
Fixivik – Using Frrole APIs find out civic issues, bring them to the government’s notice and incorporate SupportBee ticketing to track these issues. This was a very strong idea, implemented in an elegant fashion by this team. There was debate on the judge panel as to how successful this company would be, given that many such solutions have been created. We decided that the focus right now was on the quality of the hack, and its completeness. With these criteria, this hack impressed.
EnlightUs – Using Frrole APIs – draw a comparison between Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s based on what parameters people are talking about on twitter. The judge panel found this a very innovative idea, which users would find very useful. It was also among the few complete hacks.
LiftOff – Two SupportBee hacks – an automatic agent appreciating system based on ticket closing and an automated thank you email sender based on ticket closing. We were particularly impressed by the elegant hack that provided the automated email over the supportbee API. The completeness and the actual demo was very compelling. The second hack was an innovative idea, which was also complete and we felt the need to appreciate the effort by a team of 2 coming up with 2 hacks in the time frame.
HackFloaters – Use NowFloats and Frrole APIs to discover new keywords for a SMB. Hackfloaters narrowly missed out being in the winners’ circle, since there were to be only 5 winners. The consensus on the judge panel was that they wanted to appreciate their effort - they liked the idea very much, and thought the team did a good job.
Microsoft Ventures gave out a Nokia Lumia 520 handset to each of the winning teams while HasGeek announced free DroidCon tickets and StartupWeekend gave away two free tickets.
The participating startups were happy with the outcomes of the hacks and said they discovered a few use-cases they had never thought of earlier. They just wished they had more time to explore these amazing APIs.
The evening came to a close around 8 pm – after a lot of hard work, fun, food and excitement.
In closing, Ravi Narayan, Director, Microsoft Ventures in India, said: “It looks like we have found a very effective grassroots engagement model to work with the developers and startups and plan to do this on a regular basis.”
