On 12–13 June 2019 the BeMyApp team were back at TechXLR8, ExCel London to host the third edition of London Tech Week’s official hackathon — HackXLR8.
Previous years have seen specific challenges related to Smart Cities, Green Tech and Smart Homes, but this year we wanted to reward our returning devs with freedom for creativity. This year’s challenge? To create a digital solution that will enhance an enterprise. The industry, the business, the size, the scale of the projects — this was completely up to our teams. The tech? Each solution must be making use of AI, IoT or Blockchain.
With Blockchain still being a hot topic at London Tech Week 2019, we were thrilled that Decent year’s sponsor, who were providing their tech for our teams to use, and had a great team on site to support and coach the participants. They also generously offered a space on their DCube incubator as one of the prizes!
As soon as we opened our doors on Wednesday we were greeted with a big group of bright-eyed developers, designers and business minds from previous years, as well as a lot of new faces, all eager to take on the challenge. The most courageous of the bunch pitched their ideas in 60 seconds in front of a big audience that had drawn around the hackathon stage — their bid to nab the best teammates to join them and bring their idea to a solution. By lunchtime, the 15 teams were formed, and the clock had started ticking with just 36 hours left to code.
HackXLR8 is a great platform to showcase your skills to the tech industries finest and keep your finger on the pulse of the next big thing in the world of tech, but there were some great prizes up for grabs too.
1st Prize: £2500 plus a spotlight presentation and interview (worth £12.5k)
2nd Prize: £1000
On the spot prizes:
Startup Premium package for TechXLR8 2020 (Worth £2.7k)
DCube incubation
So with all that creativity, a blockchain workshop and an exclusive BeMyApp logo quiz, teams were well prepared to build some amazing solutions and pitch to the jury.
Let’s meet the teams and find out more about their ideas!
Execute.AI: Using Artificial Intelligence and Genetic algorithms to optimise the team formation process in business organisations. Using sets of various algorithms, they extract relevant information for each individual employee in the company. This is done by parsing their CV’s, looking at their commitments in projects, etc. Execute.AI can efficiently analyse multiple projects and their demands. By using multi-layer architecture of classifiers, it then searches for the possible team formations and arrives at global optima.
Nostradamus Nose: Match your product description against current news events, to attract customer interest and create talking points. Uses the market leading NLP technology, from spaCy, to provide an AI engine running on AWS lambda. Nostradamus Knows provides a marketing tool allowing product descriptions and strap-lines to be compared against a select data source to improve marketing relevance and product interest. Top matches are presented, along with a match score, providing feedback on where the product sits in relation to the data.
Mugurai: An IoT device placed on the back of any type of office chair that monitors and notifies the person to correct posture, strengthen muscles & prevent back pain. The design of the app and positive affirmation within the content engages the user to feel like they are making a positive difference for their body, thus improving their perspective on themselves. This lead to feeling valued by the company and increased efforts of the employees within their role.
VSGATE: A wireless, plug-and-play cloud-based room access solution that integrates seamlessly into existing software. Room access for office buildings and co-working spaces often have varying access control systems. Most of the solutions available on the market are wired, and a pain to install. VSGATE is a simple yet beautiful system which links a plug-and-play smart controller (which controls the door lock) via the cloud to any type of existing online platform that can change the access to different rooms. This means that the system is wireless, can be managed remotely, and is easily integrated into existing software.
Bloxis: Making dApps accessible to ordinary people via an easy to use smartphone wallet which in turn helps enterprises to onboard new users. Decentralised apps have the potential to bring services — such as finance — to people that previously did not have the opportunity to access them, and all for a lower cost than conventional services. This platform allows users to view and interact with their dApps, via interactive dashboards, all in one place. This removes the frustration of trying to access each dApp through a ‘special’ mobile browser individually. The wallet will enable users to “log in” to full dApp experiences served via browsers so that no plugins are needed.
Wireless Transactions for Electric Autonomous Cars: Data records and scalability, climate change, difficulties to implement environmental free energy resources, energy flows to reduce storage structures (power stations. The solution to all of the above? Autonomous cars that recharge themselves via wireless chargers located in different points and are able to redeem the energy not consumed. The energy is mainly generated via natural resources (wind turbines and solar panels) in some station points.
Moodcloud: Mental health issues have become an increasingly prevalent issue and concern within the workplace, resulting in employees exhibiting lower levels of happiness and productivity, and companies struggling with staff retention. Employee data is collected through fast, fun and interactive notifications to provide instant and long-term solutions to benefit both employees and employers by creating a happier and more loyal workforce. This also strengthens the company’s brand through its ethical and forward-thinking approach to employee satisfaction.
Clive AI: The cost of delivering regulated advice results in large, but minimum client sizes and reduced scope of advice coverage for Financial Advisers. Clive AI is a PaaS for Independent Financial Advisers. Through your personal documentation, Open Banking API and self-declaration Clive AI will have all the data it needs to understand and learn about you. Clive AI will source and auto-populate applications taking the friction out of switching thus keeping your holistic financial position optimised.
Health Haven: Enterprises get a lot of visitors on their website looking for specific information which cannot be put online due to the fact that the website serves general information not specific. Disappointed visitors go elsewhere. HeathHaven AI Chatbot converses with visitors and provides this specific information and creates a dataset realtime to be visualised on a dashboard by the enterprise.
Smart Photo Composition: Real-time ML-based suggestions for Well composed photos and Lighting tips based on the current scene. Helps photographers save time. The COMPOZIO app understands what kind of food is on the scene and the lighting parameters. In real-time, on your screen, there are suggestions of fantastically composed photos from Instagram, Pinterest + lighting tips. Depending on the angle, you are supplied with necessary tips in real time to shoot 5x times faster.
Prosper Chain: Early adopters to startups and small businesses have little confidence in the business profiles and their success history. Data can be manipulated, no tracks of business historical returns. That leads to a lack of trust by investors and untraceable fraudulent businesses. ProsperChain is an investor CRM that monitors startup performance and credit risk. It uses Blockchain to store real-time SME’s Xero and bank account profiles and enable the investors to have a trustworthy and confident traceable history of the business performance.
FastForward: In today’s world, a lot of information is presented in video format. However, watching videos takes time. Depending on the video, a lot of time. But what if you could access that information before hitting the play button? What if you could read a text summary, or jump straight to the interesting part? By means of Natural Language Processing algorithms, FastForward extracts information from speech in video files. The user is then presented with a description of the contents of the video, the key ideas within, as well as links to the most important parts.
BlockGet: Dematerialisation and elimination of paper documents and storage on the blockchain using IPFS and DECENT blockchain. One of the goals of the EU is to phase out documentation on paper. This solution scans valuable unique documents and tokenises them for quick and smart access.
NP-Herd: Data is the fuel for training successful machine learning models. These can help companies improve the user experience for users. But with data protection policies, this presents a major challenge to collect sensitive and private user information. For some applications such as healthTech, this becomes almost impossible. Imagine a period tracking application. NP-Herd will use federated learning to provide a unified solution — allowing companies to train data on user models without breaching user privacy.
New Renaissance: Digital Identity is one of the most sensitive assets that nowadays all of us has. People have become more risk aware and willing to browse the Digital World in a more secure way. Using a decentralized infrastructure in the blockchain to provide users a new way of browsing in the Digital World, with your data saved in a secure and encrypted way.
The final pitches to the jury were the teams chance in the spotlight to showcase their ideas and how they have built them into an MVP in just 36 hours. Each team had just three minutes to present their ideas, followed by a two minute Q&A from our judging panel.
So who was judging the hackathon projects? Let’s meet the jury. Dora Matheidesz Senior Innovation Manager for Blockchain HSBC, Michal Géci Managing Director DECENT, Dr. Harry Behrens Head of DFS Blockchain Factory Daimler Financial Services AG, Hans Huber Senior DLT Project Lead Commerzbank, Patrik Csokas Head of IT DECENT, Claire Rowland Product/UX Strategy Consultant of Claire Rowland Associates.
After the pitches, the jury had just 30 minutes to add up scores, deliberate and choose the winners!
So here they are:
BlockGet won the DCube incubation prize!
VSGATE won the Startup Premium package!
BlockGet then picked up a second prize….second place!
And finally, first place was awarded to Bloxis! Congratulations!
Well done and congratulations to all of our teams — we were super impressed by the sheer amount of work you managed to achieve in just 36 hours!
Thanks again to Informa for this great event, and to Decent our sponsor.
Read this article and thought ‘Wow, I want a piece of this hackathon action!’? — we thought so, and maybe we are coming to a city near you! Check out our current events here.
