Remember eMAG Hackathon 2016 — Future Hacks edition
24 hours may seem like a short time, but in the thrill of a hackathon, you may be amazed of what you can accomplish.
At the beginning of September we challenged our colleagues from the technology teams to look towards the future of technology and build awesome future-inspired applications. To our delight, quite a few of them said yes.
And here we are, September 3rd, 10 o’clock, spreading participant kits to the guys who were coming in large groups, impatient to get things started. Two hours later, we “let the games begin“ and everyone hurried to gather his team and write down their projects strategy.
But where there is a lot of work, there must also be a lot of fun. And we made sure it was. J The hover boards and electric scooters were the stars. One by one, each of the participants went from “I will never manage to ride this” to “It’s like riding the bike… but cooler”, and from that point, walking on two legs no longer seemed like an option. BB8 robots were coming out of every corner when you expected it less and the electric cars circuit turned participants into passionate F1 drivers. Another popular option for a break was a snack from the Burger Van outside our office or an ice cream delivered to our desks. Before dinner we invited everyone to a stand-up comedy session to light them up and give them energy for the sleepless night ahead.
On Sunday morning, a sense of urgency was hovering over the office as the teams were making every minute of the remaining hours count. At 12 o’clock the jury was all set and the presentations started. One by one, the teams made excellent use of the few minutes they had to “sell” the projects they had been working on for the past 24 hrs. Three hours later, with the dices thrown, the jury started deliberating on which projects best represented the top combination of the competition’s criteria: Business value, Innovation and Technical value.
The winners? Here they are
Best Hack prize: A gadget that allows deaf people to hear through the skin — We Think Future team
Popularity prize: A device that measures the volume of any given object — MADAC team
Business Value prize: Order assistant bot that allows customers to directly interact with their orders and find information about them.- BotTrolls team
Innovation prize: An app that allows designing your interior space before actually placing the order and without the hard work of moving large items around until you find the best spot — Edison team
Best Code: A single page application with peer to peer content distribution. The goal was optimization for page load times by extracting a JSON page from the last accessed page by a user in the same region — MWP 2 team
Still don’t have a clear image of what the competition was like? We’re sure that this video will shed some light on it!
Big congratulations to everybody involved in the competition, from participants to jury, volunteers and organizers!
