Last weekend, more than 200 people packed into digital agency Isobar’s South Station space to compete in the BattleHack – a PayPal-powered hackathon designed to spur innovation on a local and international level for the big stakes of a no-strings-attached $100,000, a slew of other valuable prizes and, of course, battle axes.
A total of 26 teams sprinted to create a socially-good app that benefited the Boston community. Hackers had SDKs and APIs from Venmo, Braintree, PayPal, Twilio, SendGrid, Context IO and Mashery at their disposals to integrate into their projects. Fueled by Boston culinary favorites like lobster rolls, North End-made cannolis and local craft beers, attendees worked full-force for 24 hours to turn their ideas into legitimate products.
The decision after the day-long event was ultimately made by five local judges: David Chang of PayPal Media Network; Simeon Simeonov of Swoop; John Underkoffler of Oblong; Abby Fichtner of the Harvard Innovation Lab; and Tim Messerschmidt of PayPal + Braintree.
Stealing first place was Team BUtiful Bois, who built Late Night Safety Kit, an app with a number of tools to ensure that Bostonians stay safe on the way to their destination late-night. The hack employs data from the City of Boston to display neighborhood crime levels in a heat map so night owls – or lost partiers – can avoid any danger. The Kit also denotes where the nearest police stations are, so, in the event of an emergency, users will know where to go.
Also notable is the app’s “Walk Me Home” feature, which lets people program their smartphone to send text messages to friends and family if they don’t reach their destination in 30 minutes. The team even took the app one step further by allowing users to donate instantly to organizations aiming to increase neighborhood security in cities across the country.
Second place went to Team Canary with a green-themed hardware hack that measured and tracked levels of pollution in Boston. Powered by a Spark Core Arduino compatible board, the app used a temperature and humidity sensor, carbon monoxide sensor and sound level detector circuit to measure, record and populate data of methane, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide and noise pollution in various corners of the city.
Coming in third was Team Hackstars, with an app that helps generate funds for charity runners – like the thousands of athletes who compete every April in the Boston Marathon. The app uses real-time tracking of a given runner, and automatically deducts funds from donators based on the number of miles the runner completes.
The Boston champion Team BUtiful Bois will head to San Jose, California in mid-November to compete against the tributes from 14 global cities, including Tel Aviv, Miami, Toronto, Warsaw and Singapore, for a new, themeless hackathon. The winner of the World Finals will be bring home $100,000 and the priceless award of glory and bragging rights to their hometown.
Congrats to all the winners, and best of luck to BUtiful Boys later this year!
Image courtesy of PayPal
