InGenius was a hackathon that was very excellently conducted, everything about the hackathon seemed to be very well thought out and outrageously well executed. It was an open theme hack conducted during October 2015, in PES South Campus.
The competition we faced at the hack was really excellent, they came with lots of preparation and had ironed out the flaws in their application, the review process used to evaluate the weight of the ideas was well thought out too, it consisted of a few rounds, first round was where they heard an overview of the idea and evaluated the presentation skills of the team, the next round was in front of a panel of judges where you could explain the intricacies of your application and get real time feedback from the judges. The next round consists of a demonstration of your idea in front of two judges who will evaluate/test your application and give you insights on the best way to take it to the market.
One thing I've realized at PES hackathons is that they encourage prototyping and pushing of a product to the market. The majority of the advice I've heard from the mentors were aimed mostly at implementing things in the real world, and trying to launch the product in the market and improving it over time.
The product we built at this hackathon lacked a certain understanding, but the idea was to build a tool using Node.js that allowed us to give a developer the fastest and easiest way to setup an initial API. If a hardware developer picks up an Arduino and prototypes a potato launcher, our app, called SnAPI, would allow him to quickly set up an API that can be launched from a web server, and the api calls made to the server would be tracked in real time and analyzed and put into charts using D3.js, quantitative values would be put in bar graphs, and it drew a line over a graph for values that were non-discrete. Our implementation depended on 2 fields, one field custom.js needed a declaration of the functions to be used by your program and the other field consisted of values. Once the api was setup, custom.js would be used to start the script and track calls, compute graphs, etc.
The demo we showed the judges failed to show them the relevancy of the need for that tool, they did not see monetary potential in the idea and we must fairly admit that too. At this hackathon I realized the importance of backing a product with monetary potential, anything you pick in a product to pitch to a hack, back it up with relevant sources on how to bring it to market and make an earning off it. Show them a business model that works and they'll be instantly a lot more interested in the product, regardless of the scope of the product.
This hack had a bar code based entry to dinner that was tracked in real time using a bar code on your ID card, I felt that was really cool and well managed. They even gave out snacks with that and I think that's a really splendid way of managing resources at a hackathon.
We were about to leave empty handed at this hackathon, but there was a competition that gave a 5k gift voucher to anyone who got the highest number of retweets with the #InGenius tag, therefore promoting their hack. So we thought we could game this competition. We posted a picture of our idea on twitter and shared the link on social media until we had around 62 retweets. Therefore we ended up being the team with the highest number of retweets so that landed us that 5k voucher. So we split the voucher in 3 and bought 3 wireless keyboard and mouse combinations for 5k.
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