Bangalore trio wins first joint hackathon with Silicon Valley
A Bangalorean developer trio has beaten its Silicon Valley counterparts to win the their first joint hackathon, the "Future of Collaboration".
The team comprises Amitesh Madhur, Sathya Narayanan Nagarajan, and Seetharamakrishna Madamsetti, dubbed "3 Collaborators". They beat 40 other teams to win the race to create a Web app prototype, based on open-standard collaboration tools. Over 200 developers in the United States and India took part.
According to a statement, their idea "Interactive Place" was chosen by the judges thanks to its creative use of WebRTC and its broad market potential. It explained the program identifies the context of the Web page, instantly creating a collaborative platform for users to text and video chat while browsing.
The trio won a US$15,000 cash prize. They will also receive additional investment, mentoring and support from Tata Communications and iAccelerator-CIIE, who will both incubate their idea through November 2013. "This hackathon has allowed us to work together with people from Bangalore and Silicon Valley to help overcome a very prevalent challenge," the trio said in the statement.
American team DeMobo took the US$10,000 prize for second place, while Bangalorean team Dev+join won the US$5,000 prize for third place.