Take an accelerator facility, gallons of coffee, no sleep, a lot very unhealthy food and a bunch of geeks over the space of a weekend and you have an idea of what Battlehack is. Basically keen developers try and build an app in less than 48 hours.
This weekend past, PayPal hosted it’s Battlehack in London as part of 14 events across the world. The competition will culminate at the World Finals event in November in San Jose, California. The winning team will receive $100,000 USD, a battle axe trophy and the coveted title of being the ‘Ultimate Hackers for Good’.
The London winners going forward to the final are Curtis Harding, Jacob Price, Michael Elsmore and Jon Hazan (pictured above). The app they created, called Hello, allows users to communicate with other individuals or groups via email, SMS, voice, hand writing and even sign language, instantly in their native language. This can then be simultaneously translated into the multiple languages of those in the chat. The judges were impressed with the numerous APIs integrated to process voice, text and gestures.
John Lunn, Senior Global Director, PayPal and Braintree Developer Network said, “Overall, the creativity and code we saw over the weekend proved London is world-class when it comes to developer talent. With a record 47 teams taking part, the competition was going to be very tough. The standard was very high and the result was so close. What made Hello stand out was the way the winners incorporated an incredible amount of technology in 24 hours and made our world a smaller place. It was just brilliant to see the way they used technology to breakdown language barriers by creating the ability for people to chat in whatever language they choose via voice, email, SMS and even sign language. I am so excited to see what the team will create at our World Finals.”
