A number of programmars and students joined 24 hours of intense hacking and pitched their projects on stage at TechCrunch Beijing Hackathon on Sunday held at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. The hours-long demo time was filled with 20 teams’ presentations displaying their thoughts, ideas and power to execute.
Hackathon is a nonstop carnival for those that eat, breathe and code. TechNode has added a Hackathon event to its tight agenda since TechCrunch 2015.
Most teams took our partner’s challenges from online coding education provider Udacity, robot operating system developer Turing Robot, maker of printable open-source humanoid robot PLEN2 and a real-time video call providing company Agora.io to acquire their scholarship. Five teams chose Udacity’s mission, two teams chose Turing Robot’s mission, seven teams chose Agora.io’s mission, and six teams started with something they wanted, and came up with fresh and innovative ideas to win TechCrunch’s Pick.
Collaboration One: First Aid App Powered by Agora.io’s live streaming video
Team First Time won the first prize, awarded by Agora.io. First Time used Agora.io’s realtime video calls to improve communication between patients and first responders such as paramedics and firefighters in case of emergency. The team demoed their app combined with Agora.io’s realtime video calls.
The current problem in the traditional way of calling 911 is that, patients cannot explain their injure effectively, and paramedics don’t understand the situation of the patient.
“Using Agora.io’s live streaming system, people can ask for help showing their injure through the video and the paramedic can tell the patient what to do first,” Liu Qing, a 22-year-old student in BIFT as well as the product designer of Team First told TechNode.
“The first responder can also check the patients’ status through the video and tell the aid to do something beforehand before their treatment. This way, we can save a lot of people’s lives,” she says.
Collaboration Two: Technology X Design
The theme of this year’s TechCrunch Beijing is Technology X Design, and some of the teams hailing from BIFT and fashion tech professionals pitched on stage to show off their talents.
“Design + technology is the future. The barrier is that designers can’t code and technicians create things that are not so stylish. We need to find the way to bridge these people together and this is my passion,” Anina Net, the founder of 360Fashion Network says. “We didn’t come here to win. It was our first time to sit with engineers together,” she says.
Anina moved from Michigan to Beijing in 2008, and started her company. 360Fashion Network provides everything to make “twinkling outfit” such as a e-textile style LED ribbon and fabric that electronics are sewed inside. Anina provided 360 fash tech kits for IoT and hardware teams in hackthon like LED bag kit, music kit and e-textile.
“During the hackathon, I could observe how engineers and designers try to consider from user’s standpoint of view to develop the product. We need to understand the end-users to get the wantable, rather than wearables. Now I know what we need for the fashion tech hackathon,” she says.
Collaboration Three: How Hackathon in China is different from other countries
“I joined this hackathon because I wanted to make friends in China and know how the Chinese people’s thinking process go with the startup,” Serephina Ha, a CEO and founder of IoT startup based in Korea tells TechNode. “Beijing is the second Silicon Valley, and I heard there’s many talent people here. I wanted to meet top talents in China.”
Serephina had joined number of hackathon held in Korea before, and she says the one in Beijing is unique, especially because of the collaboration between the teams.
“Even though they are not in your team they are willing to give advice and help them no matter what,” she says. “We were sitting with other two teams, and we were helping and cheering each other.”
Serephina’s team pitched children’s e-learning app that adopts MR and deep learning technology. The app was built by software developers working in Beijing-based startups.
“Developers in our team built up an app in 24 hours. That’s very impressive,” she said. “This is competition. But we’re here to have fun. That’s why we laughed a lot as we go through.”
Image Credit: TechNode