SoLoMo HikeAthon
Our very own awesome hackathon
SoLoMo HikeAthon
First time in the history of the world will we see a billion people access the Internet for the first time on a mobile device. Think about it. Over a billion people accessing powerful, smart compute for the first time in their lives. Their needs and interpretation of the internet will be very different from what we’re used to. We believe messaging will play a big role in bringing this large populace online to the internet.
‘SoLoMo’ was the theme of our first ever on-site Hikeathon, held at Hike Bangalore HQ. We were looking for young and brilliant developers, product managers and designers to join our team and work on a product that’ll impact more than 35 million users.
We partnered with Venturesity (another startup that helps other startups find the right people for their teams). They helped us spread the word in the developer community and in a couple of days we had 1000+ folks registered to be a part of the HikeAthon. We eventually had to go through each resume and shortlist ~100 people for the on-site event.
The 24-hour hack started on the morning of 28th March, 2015 and we made sure we unveiled the theme and made available resources to the participants on the previous evening to ensure that the participants had enough time to think about some ideas that they could hack.
Saturday, 28th March 10AM: Kickoff
98 hackers split into 30 teams had gathered at the venue and we kicked-off with Rajat Bansal, our CTO, taking the developers through the Hike Story — What it takes to run a service for 35 million users, sharing learnings.
11 AM: Carpe Diem
People set up their camps wherever they liked across the three floors of our office. (Some didn’t think twice before hijacking our conference rooms). The teams quickly started hustling and building stuff, exactly how we like it at our office.
8PM
Come evening, the participants looked confident about the work they were doing. Just to break the monotony, we had planned a treasure hunt. The 15 minutes worked wonders to refresh everyone and they were back to coding.
It was going to be an all-nighter for a lot of folks. We had bean bags and sleeping bags incase they needed to take a nap. The ones who left at night, would show up early morning to iron out the last minute bugs.
Sunday, 29th March 11AM: Code Submission time.
Work on apps had ceased and presentations begun shortly. A total of 23 teams actually completed their projects end-to-end and presented!
The Judges:
- Rajat Bansal, CTO, Hike.
- Anshumani Ruddra, Studio Head, Tiny Mogul Games (Hike’s gaming arm)
- Himadri Sekhar Jyoti, Lead, iOS, Hike
- Anshuman Misra, Head of Product — Messaging, Hike.
- Aditya Gupta, Principal Server Engineer, Hike.
The apps created, were judged on the basis of the Idea (the USP), Design Architecture, Usage of phone resources, Completion, Presentation & Demo User Experience.
While we had originally decided to choose 3 winners, we saw some really good work and just couldn’t stop at 3. We went on to acknowledge the good work of 5 teams and not just of three ☺
Here is a list of the winning teams, their ideas, and some of the technologies they used:
5. Special Appreciation: Team Janmath. This all-student team built a “social app” that had three interesting features: group chats, trending analysis, and message translation facilities. The technologies they used were Android, PHP as the backend, and Python scripts based on the Alchemy API used for sentiment analysis. For their efforts, they walked away with Rs. 5, 000 each in gift vouchers.
4. Special Appreciation: Team Builder. Due to unavoidable circumstances, other members of this team had to leave, leaving a lone crusader. The judges, impressed with his determination to complete the project, awarded him with an iPAD for his efforts. This android application facilitates “cross language communication.” Messages sent to the chat recipients are translated instantly to the preferred language.
3. Runners-Up: Team LoSoBo. This Android application enables the user to make specific requests from his or her current location (or registered location) to applicable users within a 10 sq. km area. For their efforts, the team walked away a prize of INR 1 lakh.
2. Runners-Up: SoLoMo shop. This is a location based buying and selling marketplace. The technologies they used were Android, with Parse as the backend. This four member team walked away with a total of INR 1 lakh.
- Winners: IIN-K. This four member team walked away with top honors. Their Android application enables video sharing among friends and family to preserve “wonderful moments of our lives with loved ones in real-time.”
The Winners
Each member of the winning teams were shortlisted for an interview. In addition, we identified 10 other individuals that we’d love to onboard.
We saw some great talent, innovative ideas and above all, the passion to write great code.
We look forward to the next HikeAthon and if you feel like “Damn, how the hell did I miss this?!”, write to us at hikeathon@hike.in and we’ll keep you posted.
At Hike, our mission is to Bring India Online. Life is short, build stuff that matters.
