Last month, Samsung Electronics America, in partnership with Women Who Code, hosted its first-ever B2B hackathon, the Samsung Galaxy Note8 Hackathon.
Held at the Samsung Research Center in Mountain View, California, on November 4 and 5, the 24-hour hackathon drew over 100 hackers, designers, developers and engineers, of all ages and from all across the U.S.
The weekend kicked off with opening remarks from two judges: Christy Jones, director of sales enablement at Samsung Electronics America and Zassmin Montes de Oca, CTO at Women Who Code.
In addition to Jones and Montes de Oca, the event featured three additional esteemed judges: Gladys Kong, CEO, UberMedia; Snehal Patil, director, Women Who Code, Silicon Valley; and John Rodkin, managing director, Samsung NEXT San Francisco.
Once hackers got started, they attended developer sessions run by technical experts to familiarize themselves with the Samsung SDKs and APIs, including the Samsung Pen SDK, Pass SDK, Knox Standard SDK, Knox Premium SDK and Knox Customization SDK.
Addressing Industry Challenges
Samsung technical experts identified industry-specific B2B challenges to give participants application ideas, such as authentication and proof of delivery.
Since authentication affects multiple verticals, enterprises could use a solution that seamlessly integrates biometrics and digital signature that can optimize the current authentication model.
For the transportation industry, current deliveries are improperly managed and have unreliable status tracking. Designing an integrated solution that leverages location, biometrics and digital signature could alleviate this issue.
Both of these examples presented ways for attendees to integrate Samsung technology, or get ideas for their own applications.
Awarding Innovation
After about 20 hours of hacking, each team presented their three minute demos to a preliminary panel of experts and showed just how creative, determined and innovative they could be. From those teams, eight were selected to present on-stage to our esteemed judges and the larger audience.
The winners, by category, are as follows:
Most Innovative Implementation
- Items Platform by David Menard, Rufus White, Stephanie Flowers, Paul Gallegos, Isaac Salazar
Best Use of Samsung Ecosystem
- S Waiter by Anish Singhani
Most Original/Inventive UX/UI
- Samsung Healthspace (SHS) by Bani Singh, Yunfan Yang, Anirudh Nair, Ahmed Kame
Most Viable B2B Solution
- Uber Samsung by Eric Pacheco, David Son, Alan Wang, Solomon Wu
The Best in Show winner was team Samsung Healthspace!
This year’s Best in Show winner, team Samsung Healthspace. Image courtesy of Samsung Electronics America.
The Best in Show winner will receive the event’s grand prize, which includes a trip for up to four team members to New York, a backstage tour of Samsung 837, the opportunity to spend a week with the top minds and strategists at Samsung NEXT and a meeting with key Samsung executives.
Interested in what hackathons have to offer participants? Here are five reasons to attend one.
