#HackathonPune, a 24-Hours coding competition, received a thunderous response with hundreds of software geeks and start-up people across the country participating and toiling the entire day and night to make something meaningful.
The event was organized by Fresco Capital, and e-Zest Solutions, Pune. #HackathonPune was held at e-Zest’s digital innovation centre (DIC) in Pune.
Software bots that potentially represent the future of people-system communication was the central theme of this #HackathonPune.
Students, entrepreneurs and software professionals brought in their technical expertise, free thinking and most importantly undivided attention to build innovative bot applications.
Participants were allowed to use the technology, framework and platform of their choice to build their own concept of bot. Facebook and Microsoft bot platform saw maximum traction at the event.
#HackathonPune was inaugurated with lighting the lamp by Vishwas Mahajan- Global Board Trustee of TiE Pune and other dignitaries from e-Zest, Fresco Capital and the SCRUM Alliance.
The event was kicked off with a live music band performed by 'The New Breed' a very well-known young versatile band from Pune that plays all genres of music. Participants fueled with energy of music went on to coding for the next 24 hours. To keep them charged up and productive, the arrangements for musical breaks, round the clock cafeteria and recharge zones were made.
'Music Bot' the first winner of #HackathonPune developed a bot which can be used to control the music on remote music system via a Raspberry Pi. Music Bot was designed to provide music on demand at places like restaurants, cafes etc. 'Mike Messenger' was awarded with the title of 'Best #HackathonPune start-up' during the start-up pitch event as they created a bot application based on natural language processing and machine learning. Mike Messenger quickly allows setting up appointments, making reservations and many more without switching applications or performing separate Google search.
The winners of the #HackathonPune competition won cash prizes, goodies from the Scrum Alliance and GitHub, along with free software licenses from Pipedrive and Telerik.
One of the participants at #HackathonPune said, “#HackathonPune is a great opportunity to dedicate 24-hours to your coding passion and escape from the daily operations to an environment encouraging, learning and experimentation.” He also added that, “It is an amazing experience to work in group of equally minded and dedicated people.”
The #HackathonPune event was reinforced by other events to make it a complete package of technology, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking.
In the MVP Fireside Chat, the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) gathered to discuss the latest in Microsoft technologies. Girish Chandra - Chief Evangelist moderated this event and expressed happiness over range of issues and technologies discussed during this informal chat.
The Scrum Roundtable was organized in collaboration with key members of Scrum Alliance - Lisa Reeder, Renne Mzyk, accompanied by Daniel Gullo, the author of Real World Agility - to come together to discuss and educate the importance of Scrum in professional life.
The Start-up Pitch event was created to provide a platform for idea-stage and early start-ups to present their elevator pitches to a group of investors. All these events were appreciated by the software and entrepreneurial community in Pune and manifested through full-house.
Stephen Forte, Managing Partner at Fresco Capital said, “I am very much impressed by the passion that participants exhibited at the event. We look forward to organize many such events in coming years that will create interest in new edge technology and innovative thinking.”
“This hackathon was intended to explore new possibilities and build innovative applications around bots and the result was spectacular. It’s very encouraging to see many brilliant brains working throughout day and night to bring their concept to reality”, said Devendra Deshmukh, CEO and Founder of e-Zest.
While, e-Zest and the Scrum Alliance shared a common purpose of fostering creativity and improving the development standards, they offered to be the sponsor of #HackathonPune. Whereas, TiE Pune wanted to promote entrepreneurship and Pune User Group was keen in encouraging and spreading knowledge about Microsoft technologies, thus decided to partner for #HackathonPune. #HackathonPune also saw support from partners such as: GitHub, Pipedrive, Telerik and Pune User Group (PUG).
e-Zest and Fresco Capital are committed to organize next season of #HackathonPune the following year as it is committed to volunteer for events of larger interest to the software community. All participants were equally excited for another round of #HackathonPune challenge.
