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

 

BattleHack Boston took place at Isobar this past weekend, and after 24 hours of stiff competition, 26 teams presented their hacks to our judges. The final hacks featured integrations of PayPal, Braintree & Venmo APIs and SDKs as well as of Twilio, SendGrid, Context IO and Mashery.

 

Our BattleHack Boston judges awarded the first prize to Team BUtiful Bois. Nam Chu Hoai, Connor McEwen, Guy Aridor and Connor Mathews built the app ‘Late Night Safety Kit’ that is a suite of tools to make sure that you stay safe when walking to your destination.

 

The mobile app populates data from the City of Boston to display the neighborhood crime level in the form of a heat map and locates the nearest police stations. The app has a ‘Walk Me Home’ feature that notifies your family and friends if you do not reach your destination within half an hour. Lastly, the app allows users to donate to organizations working to increase neighborhood security in cities across the county. The mobile app is built on Cordova with React.js, Backbone.js and Leaftlet + Open Street Map in the front end. It also employs Ruby on Rails, Heroku & Firebase in the backend and integrates APIs of PayPal, Sendgrid and Twilio.

 

Second place winners Team Canary created a hardware hack that measures and tracks level of pollution in the city. Powered by a Spark Core Arduino compatible board, the app uses Adafruit nRF8001 BLE module, DHT11 temperature + humidity sensor, Parallax Carbon Monoxide Sensor & Sound Level detector circuit to measure, record and populate data of methane, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide and noise pollution in different parts of the city.

 

In third place, Team Hackstars created an app that helps generate funds for charity races.  The app allows for real time tracking of a runner and automatically deducts funds from donators based on milestones that the runner completes.

 

Located above the South Station in Boston, BattleHack featured local eats including lobster rolls and clam chowder, as well as grilled cheese, cannolis and locally crafted beers. The awesome food, along with a nap center and massages kept hackers coding through the night!

 

All in all, Boston was a great city for BattleHack and we’re excited to see what Team BUtiful Bois comes up at the BattleHack World Finals.

 

Next stop – BattleHack Singapore! To find out more about BattleHack visit: https://2014.battlehack.org/

Original author: PayPal-Forward