John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Developer Network, PayPal & Braintree 

 

This past weekend, we hosted 14 teams of developers from across the globe to see who would win our $100,000 USD, no-strings-attached prize at BattleHack. Our two-day World Finals took place at the PayPal Headquarters in Silicon Valley, where each winner from the 14 city BattleHack series had 24 hours to build an app that incorporates the PayPal, Braintree or Venmo APIs.

 

Our 24-hour competition created 14 new apps, ranging from helping the visually impaired to creating an open marketplace for education. The competition was tough, but Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree; Alex Sirota, Co-Founder and CTO of Loop Commerce; Owen Thomas, Editor in Chief of ReadWrite and Danny Zhang, Co-Founder and CTO of Wish, joined me at the judges’ table to ultimately crown the team from Tel Aviv.

 

After a weekend of stiff competition and incredible food -- falafel, sushi towers, crème brûlée, lobster rolls, crepes and more -- we are thrilled to award $100,000 USD to the team from Tel Aviv to recognize their amazing technology and innovation. Second place went to Team Toronto, Alex Christodoulou, Ernst Riemer, Maya Kenedy De Magyarpade and Christopher Larsen. Third place went to the team from Boston, Nam Chu Hoai, Connor McEwen, Guy Aridor and Connor Mathews.

 

Its developers like Team Tel Aviv’s Shai Mishali and Pavel Kaminsky that can really change the world through innovative uses of technology. Their hack, AirHop, is a collaborative consumption application for consumers to share carrier or wi-fi access. The app enables a mobile phone with no connectivity to "hop" onto another person's device (running the service) to make a phone call or send a text in exchange for a PayPal-enabled payment.

 

BattleHack World Finals was also a fun and rewarding experience for the developers. Shai and Pavel shared, “Without BattleHack we would have never had the chance to do something so bold. It was an incredible experience.”

The goal of our BattleHack program is to find the best and brightest developers around the world and share with them the tools to affect change. I’ve been inspired by the success of the BattleHack series in just two short years -- it’s extremely encouraging to see what the future holds.

 

We look forward to hosting BattleHack 2015 to meet a whole new crew of developers (and returning hackers too)! Please visit battlehack.org/ for more information and updates.

Original author: PayPal-Forward