John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Developer Network, PayPal & Braintree
Hackers from England, Germany, Poland, Switzerland and Spain competed against one another during the 24-hour period and were fueled by England’s finest delicacies of fish & chips, meat pies, candy floss, toffee apples and sampled traditional ales to compliment a Sunday Roast.
All of the judges were thoroughly impressed by all of the teams’ hacks – the creativity and code we saw over the weekend proved London is world-class when it comes to developer talent. With a record 47 teams taking part, the competition was going to be very tough. In the end our judges—Adizah Tejani, Head of Ecosystem Development at Level 39; Margaret Gold, Founder at Over the Air; Ruben Kostucki, Director of Growth with Makers Academy; Tak Lo, Director at TechStars and myself, deemed Team Hello the winners of BattleHack London.
Curtis Harding, Jacob Price, Michael Elsmore and Jon Hazan of Team Hello created a chat app that allows any user to converse in any language and have it translated into the language of the reader, using text, voice or even sign language. They incorporated an incredible amount of technology in the allotted 24 hours and made our world a smaller place.
Team Hello was not without tough competition: in second place, team Oxifiy’s hack enabled locals to share mobile data connections with tourists, providing cheap data to tourists when they are visiting. The developers created an iOS app, built on Swift and Python and allowed grateful visitors to reward the sharer using Braintree and PayPal; they also used Twilio for email notifications.
In third place, Jambox Inc created an integrated app with @Spotify, @SoundCloud and built on Node.js with AngularJS on the front end.
Next month, Team Hello will travel to PayPal headquarters in San Jose to compete against 13 other amazing hack teams in the BattleHack World Finals. We can’t wait to see what they come up with.
To find out more about BattleHack visit: https://2014.battlehack.org/