Photos: Vignettes from the sim,ultaneous Indo-US hackathon. Bottom The winning team of Madhur, Nagarajan and Madamsetti
Mumbai and San Francisco: Tata Communications hosted the world’s first simultaneous Silicon Valley and Bangalore hackathon last week, by allowing users to easily interact with other users on the same web page using video and text through their browsers.
During the two-day hackfest nearly 200 developers in both countries worked together to innovate next-generation open-standard collaboration tools.
Following an exciting pitch process ‘Interactive Place’ was chosen by the judges thanks to its creative use of WebRTC and its broad market potential. The program identifies the context of the webpage, instantly creating a collaborative platform for users to text and video chat while browsing. The applications for business in terms of customer interaction and supporting education are limitless. They will also bring significant benefits to the every-day user. The team behind the winning concept is Amitesh Madhur, Sathya Narayanan Nagarajan and Seetharamakrishna Madamsetti – who participated in the Bangalore side of the global hack.
The team took on 40 other teams across Bangalore and Silicon Valley to fight it out for the wining spot. They receive a $15,000 cash reward and their idea will be incubated by Tata Communications and iAccelerator-CIIE through November 2013. Both companies will provide investment, mentoring and infrastructure support to bring the concept to reality.
The second place award ($10K) was given to a team from Silicon Valley for their app called ‘DeMobo’ and Neehraj N Joshi, Prince Jain and Nilabh Pandey from Bangalore received the third place award ($5k) for their collaborative tool called ‘Dev+join’. Other awards include, Best Business Model ($10K), Best Collaboration between locations ($5K), Audience Favourite in Bangalore and Silicon Valley ($5K each), Best Tool for Education ($3K), as well as two on-the-spot Honourable Mention awards ($1K each) in Silicon Valley and Bangalore respectivelyTata Communications’ Future of Collaboration hackathon, co-sponsored by TiE, Media Network Services, vLine, Twilio, TCS, Tech Meetups, NestGSV and iAccelerator-CIIE saw an overwhelming response from the developer community. July 23 2013
SEE ALSO A VIDEO OF THE EVENTS ON OUR HOME PAGE FOR A FEW DAYS WWW.indiatechonline.com