'Interactive Place' app wins first prize at Tata Comm Hackathon

Collabhack 13, a hackathon focusing on collaboration captivated an enthusiastic and passionate team of coders, designers and marketers from Bangalore and Silicon Valley between July 12th and 14th, 2013. The hackathon was held by Tata Communications on 'Future of Collaboration' to drive collaboration tools. After 48 hours of coding, 'Interactive Place,' a contextual interactive platform which targeted the healthcare segment developed by Sathya Narayanan, Amitesh Madhur and Seetharamakrishna bagged the first prize worth USD 15,000 from India. It will now be incubated by Tata Communications for three months.

At this two day hackfest over 150 developers from Bangalore and Silicon Valley innovated on collaboration tools and built on open APIs including WebRTC.

There were 12 teams from Bangalore at the hackathon. The prize has been co-sponsored by NextGSV and iAccelerator.

The applications developed at the event include:

'ShopX360' which is a platform for retail business,

'Kollabify' which aims to provide technical support over WebRTC,

'ColProMan' which is a collaboration project management application to facilitate coding at real time

'TIZEL' which provides subtitling for video to help to comprehend/ follow different accents,

'Connect Square' helps to connect people at different places during a visit to restaurants.

'ICE' enables meetings over unified communication to get a summary or minutes of the meeting in real time,

'Tweet Hop' enables tweeters to talk it out rather than testing, and

'Javas++' relies on an artificial intelligence and can answer on behalf of humans.

Amit Sinha Roy, Vice President, Marketing & Strategy, Global Enterprise Solutions at Tata Communications said, "We are dedicated to encourage budding talents and generate innovative applications that will promote seamless collaboration. Application were judged based on their potential to enhance productivity of teams, improve on today's collaboration tools and special consideration will be given for business model innovation."

Judging criteria was based on the usefulness of solution demonstrated (30%), strength of business model and monetization potential of solution demonstrated (30%), creative usage of open APIs such as WebRTC in the technology stack (20%) and market impact (20%).

Judging panel comprised of Julie Woods-Moss, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata Communications; Karl Perkins, Chief Architect - UC & C, Tata Communications; Jack Hidary, Founder and former Chairman and CEO, Dice.com; Prashant Shah, TiE Board of Directors & Head of TiE Angels; Dan Gonzalez - Director of Strategic Partnerships, nestGSV; Bill Haskins Senior Analyst Wainhouse Research, LLC W Denver, Colorado USA; and Tanvi Shah Rangwala, Director - iAccelerator & ICT Initiatives Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship