John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Braintree and PayPal Developer Relations

BattleHack London was packed full with alumni hackers including past champions of 2013 and 2014. Developers from England, Romania, Spain, Berlin and Poland united into a total of 45 teams for a place at the highly coveted BattleHack World Finals.

Held at Tobacco Dock, an early 19th century tobacco warehouse set in central London, hackers competed alongside the iconic London marathon in their very own marathon hacking session.

Enjoying endless traditional British foods, craft beers, massages and first class mentorship, hackers presented to me alongside renowned London tech scene judges: Jess Williamson (TechStars), Julia Shalet (Mobile Academy) Tom Scott (Maker) and Paul Hallet (Lyst) in a bid to take the title. And as I expected, the competition was fierce.

After 24-hours, Team @Risk took first place with their app that applies behavioral tracking to senior citizens in order to alert their children or carers in the event of a medical emergency. Their app integrated a massive amount of APIs and technologies including Braintree, Estimote, Localz (a recent participant in our London Start Tank), Pusher, SendGrid and Twilio.

In second place, student team Disasturvey took home Xbox ones with their app: a service that allows to interact with disaster areas through a simple IoT device. Grandma’s New Groove took home third place with an app that helps the elderly to travel to predefined locations through a lightweight Internet of Things device that taps into the Uber API to book taxis to take them to pre-specified locations.

We’re excited for Team @Risk to see what they bring to the World Finals this November. Next up on our world tour is Athens – stay tuned!

To find out more about BattleHack, please visit https://2015.battlehack.org/