HYDERABAD, India -- Innovation never sleeps! rapidBizApps successfully completed their third hackathon where ideas and code flowed as freely as the biryani and drinks late into the night. The hackathon attracted some of the best developers from Wipro and HCL to boutique App development companies such as NowFloats and Cognitive Clouds.
Vanaja Alle was declared the winner for her App that let teachers to interact and collaborate with students in their classes on the progress of assigned work. The judges Mr. Hari Krishnan, CEO of CloudGust, Mr. Rohit Bhist, COO of CloudGust, and Mr. Subba Raju Pericherla, Founder and Director of Cross Borders made their decision based on business viability, Design Quality, Originality and Completed Functionality within the app/ solution.
“I’m really impressed with the extent to which these hackers have completed their ideas. Most App projects take about 6-8 weeks. These folks took less than 36 hours to build some amazing products. In the end, I was actually surprised by the output generated in one and a half days – the amount of work done was simply amazing” said Rohit.
“I guess that’s what you get when you get a room full of really smart, highly motivated people into a room and just let them create the next big thing” said Chandra Gillellamudi, one of the developers at rapidBizApps.
Hackers built native apps using a variety of infrastructures that help accelerate app development – atleast that’s what most of the smart ones do. “Kumar Kalluri and I used a stack with Android SDK and Parse.com to build ThirdEye, and app that we thought could be used by blind people to read books. It is hard for the blind to speed read Braille books or Audio CDs – so we designed an app that is easy for the blind to read, re-read, skip chapters, paragraphs, sentences by simply tapping different sections of a screen. There is a small 2 minute training period involved – but after that, it is pretty straightforward” said Ganapathi Garre.
rapidBizApps has committed to testing this solution with a blind students in Hyderabad. The team said they were inspired by an idea proposed by Krishna Kunam, CTO of rapidBizApps. “I’ve seen very smart blind people attempt to get Ph.D’s. I thought we could build a solution to assist them. Looks like Gani and Kumar latched onto the idea”
“I’ve been to a lot of hackathons in Bangalore. I’m happy that we are now starting to host hackathon’s in Hyderabad too. It promotes innovation, and a startup culture. This hackathon was slightly different in that it had a theme” said Prakash Kumar. Prakash and Karthik worked on an app that integrates with ePub services to help students learn collaboratively.
“We at rapidBizApps strongly believe in Innovation. So, Hackathons and Innovation Tournaments are part of rapidBizApp’s DNA” says CEO Satish Penmetsa. “The best ideas are generated by putting together really smart people that have experienced some sort of pain in their lives, and that believe they can do something better. Phanindra Sama founded RedBus when he had trouble getting bus tickets to travel back home. That’s the kind of pain that generates the best business ideas. There are enough problems to solve in the world. We value innovation and we recognize that the best ideas come when exceptionally talented people come together and focus on common problems. I experienced this first hand at a class taught by Prof. Karl Ulrich at Wharton. Essentially, groups of really smart, highly motivated people are significantly more likely to come up with brilliant, elegant solutions to problems. This is why IDEO, one of the most widely respected design companies, Apple and Google are so successful. We at rapidBizApps have built a similar infrastructure to attract, nurture and challenge some of the best and brightest mind to experiment and create the next set of innovative apps. Some of our best innovations: the rapidFormFactory, rapidSyncEngine, insuranceAgentCRM, smartE-PBX have all come out of these internal Hackathons. And, this is the primary reason we continue to run these Hackathons”
Organizing such large scale events takes quite a bit of advanced planning. “Hats off to Pavan Bhushan Maganti and Manusha Yandra and all volunteers – Satish Kocharlakota, Abhilash Komara, Chandra, and others for spearheading the planning and running the hackathon smoothly. I think they did a fantastic job” said Parmeshwar Bayappu, Director at rapidBizApps.
“Retaining very sharp and proactive people is a challenge in the software industry. At rapidBizApps, I think Satish and Krishna do an excellent job of engaging and motivating employees, and giving them opportunities to excel both technically and in doing extra-curricular activities. Being able to organize large scale product launches is important to what I want to do 5 years from now. At rapidBizApps, I have ample opportunities to hone these skills – organizing the logistics all the way from marketing and inviting judges to setting up the systems and arranging food for was an important milestone in my career growth. It is one of the reasons I like working here at rapidBizApps” said Pavan Maganti, the lead organizer for this hackathon.
rapidBizApps organizes regular hackathons at colleges, training institutes, and at rapidBizApps’ headquarters in Madhapur, Hyderabad. “We are always looking towards partnering with the best colleges and large companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook to organize these hackathons. Please get in touch with us at hack@rapidBizApps.com (mailto:love2hack@rapidBizApps.com) to partner with us in organizing a hackathon at your college or training institute.”
The next hackathon will be held on Sept 14th and 15th, again at rapidBizApps’s Madhapur office in Hyderabad. To find more information, please visit http://www.rapidBizApps.com/hack4.html
About rapidBizApps:
rapidBizApps prides itself in building intuitive, elegant and reliable Apps out of their offices in the San Jose, California, USA and Madhapur (Near Image Gardens Function Hall), Hyderabad, India. Come join us for our ‘Fun@5 on Fridays’ to experience our can-do culture. BTW, we are also looking for exceptional iOS and Android programmers – if you think you fit the bill, shoot us your resume to jobs@rapidBizApps.com. Learn more about all the bleeding edge technologies and solutions we are working on at http://www.rapidBizApps.com
