Hackathon comes to City!

This one’s for the tech savvy people out there. Recently, Yahoo! India had a successful completion of its first ever Agency Hack in India. It was a 24-hour non-stop hackathon which was held in Gurgaon on November 2 and 3.

The event saw participation from leading advertising agencies with teams from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai competing to come up with smart digital and tech-powered solutions to address real-life challenges.

Agency teams comprised developers, designers, user-experience specialists, copy-writers, media planners and digital strategists who got together to come up with innovative ideas to build prototype solutions within 24 hours. Participating teams chose to either build a campaign-based solution or a product-based using technologies from Yahoo! and other
players.

The hacks were adjudged by a team comprising technology, media and marketing experts. The gold prize was won by the team from Web Chutney for their utilitarian hack ‘Y! Loo’ -  a hardware-led hack!

It allows users to remotely check the status of the office loos and conference rooms. Users can knock on the door if the loo is engaged and it is smart enough to notify the user back, once vacant.  

Team Digitas walked away with the silver prize for their twitter-based hack ‘Twinority Report’, a tweet investigator that anticipates criminal intentions ranging from drug abuse to suicide to serious national threats by analysing keyword patterns.

The bronze prize was won by Sapient Nitro for their movie viewing companion experience platform ‘Lens’.  “It feels really good to have won at the first-ever Agency Hack in India. For this event we wanted to solve a problem that we ourselves face and that’s how we came up with the ‘Y Loo’.

We are five of us in the team, and only one has been to the US. So a trip to participate in the international hack event is thrilling. We are so kicked about it!” said Sattvik Mishra, from Web Chutney.