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Hackathon ’16: Innovation, Teamwork, and Celebration

Category Work Culture

 

In this era where everyone is working towards deadlines and burning the midnight oil, Nineleaps organized Hackathon ’16 to break the monotony.

A two-day event aimed towards bringing a stimulating environment by having an open playfield.

The participants had the freedom of zeroing in on their own ‘challenge’. They also had the choice of building their team as well as deciding on the demonstration format to bring their ‘idea’ to the forefront.

Let the Hack begin!

We began the day by introducing the underlying theme of the event and presented a welcome kit to all. The participants started brainstorming on ideas by breaking up into teams. We could witness a broad spectrum of emotions in the environment: energy, thrill, excitement, anticipation and sense of togetherness.

There was a meeting to know the progress of teams where the de-facto captains described the idea they were working on. Each squad took a quirky name to establish a strong, coherent identity.
And then, we were off!

The energy set in as everyone started working sincerely towards their objectives. After an intense session of mind racking and ideation, the teams were ready with the prototypes of their projects and started working vociferously towards the end game.

Here is a brief about the teams:

1.  Team Fantastic came up with a beautiful idea of keeping our best friends closer to us. By best friends here we mean books! They brought in the concept of digitizing the libraries. This would not only help readers find the book they need in a jiffy but also help them know when a book is available in the library.
 

2. Team Melange (also dubbed as Phir Milenge by many) wanted to break communication barriers between employees. Thus, their idea was to build a tool which will enhance employee engagement within organization in an informal way. They named it ‘Affable’ and it was meant to help colleagues know each other’s skills and interests, and communicate with them.

 3. The Brogrammers (the brotherly community of programmers) understood that for an employee, documenting the project work or skills on a continuous basis and translating them to a personal profile becomes a tough task. Thus, they conceived the idea of ‘Resume on Demand’ platform.Instead of going through the tiring process of filling up forms, the data for resume could be fetched from the social media channels and updated accordingly.


4. The team ‘Return of Shaktimaan’ built a device named ‘TurtleMode’. (with this device, people could feel like a superhuman, hence the team name)

Probably, they thought being lazy is an awesome feeling *wink*. So, they came up with a prototype app to control multiple electronic appliances connected to this plug-in device with a tap of a finger. Also, one could monitor the energy consumption of the devices for smart usage in future.

5. Team Navi addressed the problem of finding a proper career guidance and thus, ‘Chaperone’ was made. This is a tool powered by AI which will help people find the right career path for themselves depending on their area of interest and skills.
 
6. The TEAM (Together Everyone Achieves More) worked around the idea of reusing things what most of us regard as waste. They named their mobile app as ‘Doorstep’ and this literally translated to what they planned to do. Anyone could use Doorstep to let the volunteers know if they have excessive food to give away or clothes which they do not wear any longer. These will then be collected and distributed among the ones who are in need.
 

7. The Codengers pondered on how to make this world a better place to live in. One of the most alarming concerns nowadays, as we all know it, is safety. This team designed an app and called it ‘The Butterfly Effect’. This app was meant to integrate the existing safety measures with latest technologies to make it more effective. Thus, guarding people against unfortunate events.
 
8. Team Pirates discussed the need for the data driven dynamic design. They proposed a solution to provide immediate feedback by using CSS-styled feedback system or by a development of plugins, feeding real data to create the efficient designs.
 
9. Team Pegasus played around augmented reality and showed how we could decide on the furniture that will suit our house even before buying it. The app used a camera to help project 3-dimensional view of the object. With ‘Pegasus’, shopping furniture for our homes will no longer be a tough task.
 
On D-Day, everyone passionately presented their ideas to the larger workgroup, getting feedback from the founders and their peers. The best ideas got a lovely surprise: a corpus fund to bring their ideas to fruition, with full support from the founders!

The event was rounded up with a fun day-out for the winners to the IPL finals between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad.

After all; work needs to have a play to come a full circle.

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