John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Braintree and PayPal Developer and Startup Relations
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This past weekend, BattleHack 
We once again returned to 1871, a state-of-the-art collaborative space in the historic Merchandise Mart building, overlooking the Chicago River. With pour over coffee from Modest Coffee, Portillo’s hot dogs, Saucy Porka’s Bacos (Bao+Tacos), deep dish pizza and on demand massages, the hackers crunched through 24-hours to bring their code to life.
Joining me at the judges table was Harper Reed, CEO of Modest Inc.; Drew Olson, Engineer Lead at Braintree; and Craig Ulliott, Co-Founder & CTO of Belly. We were all impressed by each of the hacks, but in the end, Team Dozer-Tazer took home the coveted axe.
David Gonzalez, Norman Usenkanov, Prasanna Balasubramani and his brother, Ravishankar Balasubramani (who were the first ones to arrive at BattleHack) of Team Dozer-Tazer won the epic glowing axe prize for their mobile app and hardware hack(s). By using the front camera of the smartphone to monitor the eyes of the driver, the app will alert the driver through an alarm, or the vibration of the smart watch, and notify an emergency contact through smart phone or a Spark Core hack should the driver fall asleep. The app integrated both PayPal and Venmo to accept payments. Team Dozer-Tazer will go on to represent Chicago at the World Finals this November & compete for the grand prize.
Second place winner, Team Grndma.io, created an app for the elderly that can be easily customized to perform certain tasks such as order groceries, call someone, or provide services through Uber, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. They took home X Box One consoles. In third place,Team Hawkers4Change took home Adafruit ARDX kits. They created a platform that links all the user’s professional networks (such as LinkedIn, Github, Stack Overflow) and aggregates their data to measure their expert level.
I am excited to see what Team Dozer-Tazer will create at the World Finals this November! For our next BattleHack, we will be crossing over the Atlantic to Venice, Italy.
To find out more about BattleHack visit: https://2015.battlehack.org/