Advertisement

Meet the winners of Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014

Winners of Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014 and Judges
Winners of Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014 and Judges

Winners of Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014 and Judges

It was to be a grueling 32 hours ahead – yet 146 developers across Singapore and Malaysia trekked down to Hackatron Asia Singapore early last Saturday morning in preparation for it. There were big monitors set up and people napping on self-brought pillows as early as 930am – even before we started the show. And to what end?

A two-day hackathon and geek festival, Hackatron Asia is the first in a series of developer-focused events by Tech in Asia for developers, non-developers, and the technical-oriented public.

Attendees of the first Hackatron Asia learnt about new technologies and SDKs from sponsors PayPal-Braintree and YotaPhone, and had to choose the challenges they would participate in. There was also the Hackatron Knockout Challenge organized by HackerTrail, where hackers were invited to debug JavaScript code in real-time and eliminate other hackers to win a prize. Hackatron also had attendees come for a full day of workshops and developer group show-and-tells to learn about WatchKit, Ruby, PHP, and more.

Read on for the winners of the individual challenges as well as the overall winners of this inaugural Hackatron.

PayPal-Braintree Challenge Winners

Teams had to leverage PayPal and/or Braintree APIs for payment processing in a mobile or web app. These three winners won Parrot drones.

2nd Runner-Up: Geckomarket

Geckomarket redefines how e-commerce should be. It allows users to launch their products within minutes with minimal input. The result will be a product page that accepts and tracks payments. The user can also leverage on the widget to transform any website or blog into an ecommerce website with Geckomarket to track sales.

The product is currently live and in beta mode, and was produced by a single developer.

1st Runner-Up: ZenStorage

ZenStorage also won first runner-up in the overall Hackatron. We explain how it works further down.

Winner: I Am Groot

This team consisted of students and national servicemen, and it sure knew how to make an impression. Team I Am Groot was easily the most obvious of all teams as it had its own drone as part of its pitch, coupled with the team name’s nod to pop culture.

Groot is an autonomous flying vending machine that delivers high value or urgently-needed items to customers.

Yota Challenge Winners

Teams were challenged to start a user experience revolution on a dual screen phone. These three winners won cash prizes and YotaPhones.

2nd Runner-Up: Infinite Loopers

An app that permanently shows all the important information (missed call alerts, emergency contact numbers, last known location, phone shutdown date and time etc.,) on the YotaPhone’s back screen before the phone runs out of power.

This was a team of four who had previously participated and won the National University of Singapore’s iCreate hackathon.

1st Runner-Up: Fonwall

Fonwall allows anyone to transform his or her YotaPhone’s back screen into an advertising channel. They can choose from a library of images, publish them, and get paid for it.

The team includes former university classmates and former teammates at previous hackathons, with the addition of a new member whom they met at Hackatron.

Winner: Mulinga

This was one of the more visually engaging presentations amongst the finalists.

Mulinga is a multilingual speech recognition and translation mobile application. The user of this application will speak in his native language and this gets translated to the language in which he wants to communicate. The person with whom you want to communicate will read it in the language he understands on the other screen of the phone. The application leverages the dual screen functionality of the YotaPhone to display the translated script on the back screen of the phone.

Overall Winners

These teams won cash prizes and passes to Startup Asia conferences in 2015. Judges were Bradley Priest (co-founder and CTO of TradeGecko), Bregadeesh Samapathy (CTO of Luxola), and Ruiwen Chua (tech co-founder of 99.co).

2nd Runner-Up: Recelptive

All of us kept mispronouncing this team’s name. It was chosen because the team was originally working on an idea regarding e-receipts, but shelved it. In the end, the team presented a browser built for comfortable web browsing on e-ink displays especially for the dual-sided YotaPhone. Through content extraction and image enhancement algorithms, Recelptive hopes that users will get a similar if not better experience browsing the web on the YotaPhone.

This team has worked together on several hackathons before and consisted of students from Raffles Institution, who were all previously part of the Computer Elective Program.

1st Runner-Up: ZenStorage

ZenStorage is a system designed to merge different cloud storage systems. By encrypting all traffic between the user, servers, and the data before relaying the latter to its own storage, there is added security. ZenStorage also adds redundancy based on technology currently used in high-availability hard disk solutions. The file is stored in pieces across the different storages and the redundancy technology means that should any one storage go offline or get compromised, the pieces that were in it can be recalculated from the other pieces.

Champion Winner: YotaCast

YotaCast is a home surveillance app that leverages on the power-saving features of YotaPhone’s e-ink display. Users can now view snapshots of their laptop camera which will be sent and displayed in a widget on the YotaPhone, and refreshed at preset time intervals. This means constant access to monitor your house, and at the same time conserving your phone’s power consumption.

Using OpenCV, motion detection features were added to the cameras to notify the phone whenever the webcam detects movements at home. At the same time, local histogram equalization algorithms were used to enhance the grayscale image so that the images are displayed in greater detail in the e-ink display.

The team has released the code for YotaCast.

Hackers at Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014
Hackers at Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014

Hackers at Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014

Big congratulations to all winners and to all for making it through. Thank you to our sponsors for making Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014 happen!

This post Meet the winners of Hackatron Asia Singapore 2014 appeared first on Tech in Asia.