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, we hosted our seventh BattleHack of 2015, and for the first time, in Tokyo. We kicked off with a keynote address by Yukihiro Matsumoto, founder of the Ruby programming language, to inspire our hackers with his story of Ruby’s development from its early days to the present.

With more than 40 teams battling at Osaki Bright Core Hall, I was very impressed by the sheer talent of the developers. To keep up their energy, we treated our participants to ramen burgers, Guzman y Gomez burritos, live chef prepared sushi and sashimi, craft beers and the ultimate Japanese summer treat – kakigori, shaved ice with syrup, mochi and adzuki beans.

In the end, we crowned Team Talk’n’Pick – Daniel Perez, Michi Kanda, Hironori Inagaki and Yuya Soneoka – the winners who all took home a “battle axe” trophy and a paid-trip to PayPal headquarters this November to compete in the BattleHack World Finals for USD$100,000 and the title of, “Ultimate Hacker for Good.”

Ken Nishimura, Editor of TechCrunch Japan; Akira Matsuda, Founder of Asakusa.rb; Hiro Maeda, Angel Investor of BEENOS and I had a hard time selecting a winner, but Team Talk’n’Pick’s video editing system proved to have the best integration. By tracking audio input fluctuations and extracting the most important segments in a video, the app automatically selects the best parts of a video and combines the preferred clips into a highlight reel. And, in order to accept payments, the team integrated Braintree’s v.zero SDK.

Team Talk’n’Pick will go on to represent Japan at the BattleHack World Finals this November as they compete against 13 other teams from around the world for the grand prize. I’m excited to see what they will build at the World Finals, but first, on to find their competition in Berlin next weekend.

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