By Péralte C. Paul
They came. They hacked. They solved.
About 40 people converged at the Advanced Technology Development Center over the weekend to put their problem-solving skills to real-world use by competing in the first ATDC Weekend Hackathon held Aug. 28-30.
Unlike most hackathons, where hackers bring their solutions to problems they see, the ATDC Weekend Hackathon brought them to solve the challenges several startup companies had and wanted addressed.
“What we all realized is that we all have some problems on our list of “to-dos” that get bumped from week to week to week and never attacked,” said Everett Steele, co-founder of Kanga, an ATDC Signature company. Steele spearheaded the efforts to put the hackathon together.
Nine companies presented their challenges to the hackers who then broke up into teams to try and solve those problems.
The needs were wide-ranging and included specific software glitches that need to be fixed to new stand-alone platforms to solve the problems identified by the Signature companies, which included: Kanga, Rescour, Cognosos, Groundfloor, Florence Healthcare, Synapp.io, and First Performance.
“It’s really been a great weekend of collaboration with our ATDC Signature companies, our hackers and our sponsors. We’ve built some great pieces of technology and its been a wild success.”
The winning teams were:
- 1st Place: Team Florence Healthcare. $500 cash prize for developing a mobile app that helps capture hospital paper documents via image to feed into trial-sponsoring pharmaceutical firms.
- 2nd Place: Team Groundfloor. $300 cash prize for creating a better mobile communications tool with more transparency for investors.
- 3rd Place: Team Rescour. $150 cash prize for building a SHIRML app for Rescour that is designed to help renters find accurate apartment data. (Team Rescour also won the “Crowd Favorite” award.)