John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Developer Network, PayPal & Braintree
Hackers coded for 24-hours straight and were treated to a feast of food including ramen burgers from The Traveling C.O.W., Sushi burritos, Roti pratas and durian ice cream.
I was joined by a great panel of judges in Singapore - Bernard Leong, VP of Digital Services at Singapore Post and Angel Investor; Gwendolyn Regina Tan, Head of Business Development APAC at Tech in Asia; Jeffrey Paine, Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures; and Yang Bin Kwok, Director of Engineering, Chat at Zopim – and we were all impressed with the Singapore competitor’s hacks.
In the end, Team TalkWithMe emerged victorious by solving a social problem for Singapore and many multilingual societies. Ashish Awaghad, Mark Thien and Ben Liew, created SmoothTalk, a custom iPhone keyboard that translates typed input into a desired language in real time across all apps. This enables users to communicate effortlessly, regardless of their linguistic backgrounds and integrates with PayPal to allow for subscription payments.
Second place was awarded to Team Rubicon Social, who brilliantly created the HERO app, which allows people with varying disabilities to discover and find appropriate sports games to participate in. Team Fantastic Four, took home third place with their app that connects users to small business professionals, anywhere and anytime.
Team TalkWithMe will compete for the $100,000 grand prize against the other worldwide teams at PayPal Headquarters in Silicon Valley at the BattleHack World Finals.
From Singapore, we now fly to Mexico City for our 12th BattleHack of the year!
To find out more about BattleHack visit: https://2014.battlehack.org/