John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Braintree and PayPal Developer and Startup Relations
Please see this post on our new PayPal Stories site.
This past weekend, hackers joined 
Hackers from all over Europe joined us for BattleHack Venice and developed some interesting and creative apps. I was joined by Mario Viviani- CEO of Mariux Apps , Luigi Giglio - Co-Founder & CTO of AppsBuilder, and H-Farm Co-Founder and CEO Riccardo Donadon to judge the hacks. We had some tough decisions to make!
Eventually, we crowned Team CCC as winners of BattleHack Venice. Team CCC created a circuit which can be implanted into a device, such as a laptop. This can then be used to locate the device in event of theft, through an Android application, and even then used to disable the device through short-circuiting the battery and the hard drive! The Android app was supported by a PHP and CodeIgniter backend. This is a subscription service, using Braintree’s recurring billing features.
Second prize-winners, taking home Xbox Ones, were Orto Mio. Orto Mio is a cashless marketplace for purchasing local produce. After purchase, users are incentivised to leave reviews, and can also subscribe to a producer for regular deliveries, or bulk discounts.
The third prize went to Team ByU who created an Internet of Things security tag, and a mobile application. Users can view items that are for sale in a store. Once they’ve selected an item and paid with PayPal, the customer presents their mobile phone to an NFC reader on the tag, which triggers the security tag to open, allowing the customer to remove the security tag and leave the store with their paid item.
We’re taking a short break for BattleHack in Europe (whilst every European enjoys the summer!) but Toronto and New York are up next and we’re excited to see what both these awesome cities will come up with!
To find out more about BattleHack, please visit https://2015.battlehack.org/.