Picture this: You are taking a stroll with your friend and listening to music through earphones. The earphones allow only the music and your friend's voice to enter your ears and block away the traffic noise. Just then your smartphone informs you that you better get a medical checkup as its sensors have found that your pulse rate and blood pressure are erratic. It suggests you a diagnostic center and you tap a button to get an appointment fixed. On the fixed day, you and your wife go to the diagnostic center and get the tests done. The payment system at the center sends the bill to your phone. You tap on your phone and the payment is made. All the while, your wife is busy on her smartphone planning a vegetable garden for the balcony. On the way home, and near a grocery store, your wife's smartphone alerts her of her kitchen shopping list automatically generated by connected smart containers. You two enter the grocery shop. Its systems connect with your smartphones and know what you need.
Some might call such a scenario a dream. Other might call it a privacy nightmare. Dream or nightmare, all this can become the way of our life very soon. Genius minds across the world are working hard to develop all sorts of innovative technologies for our convenience.
Some such brilliants minds assembled in Delhi recently to participate in 30Hacks, a 30 hour long non-stop session of coding and designing new technologies. #30Hacks was organized by GlobalLogic, in association with NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies).
GlobalLogic, a experience design and digital product development company, is headquartered in United States and has design and engineering centers across the world. GlobalLogic works with start-ups as well as established brands for developing disruptive technologies and innovative products. The 30Hacks that was recently organized by them is the 7 th in the series of such events.
This year's event started on 19 th February. 28 teams from across India participated in it. All these teams were trying to develop ground breaking products centering around Digital Disruption in areas of media, communications, healthcare, connected solutions, retail, financial services and security domains.
30Hacks offered an opportunity to brilliant coders, developers and start-ups to convert their ideas into new and innovative solutions and products. In this 30 hour long marathon session, the teams were helped and supported by the experts from GlobalLogic.
The teams worked on variety of ideas. One team worked on Smart Containers. That is, cheap and affordable containers that had sensors in them and could alert a smartphone about the diminishing quantity of their contents. One team that included a 12 years old coder worked on a messaging app for official use that can help authorized sender broadcast messages to a large number of recipients. One team worked on an online tool for Urban Organic Farming. This tool can help the user discover better gardening plan and practices. There was also a team working to aid the Clean India initiative. Their solution was designed to help users rate their localities based upon its cleanliness and hygiene conditions. The data that this service might help generate could be used by government agencies to better plan their cleanliness drives etc. There was a team called Swadhaar that was designing a service that integrated the whole medical ecosystem of doctors, chemists, diagnostic centers etc to make it more convenient for the users to access medical aid. A team called Local Bliss was developing a system to help users get genuine medicines home delivered from local chemist shops.
All in all, the International Youth Center in Delhi (where the event was held) was buzzing with creative ideas and innovative technologies during the 30 hours of 30Hacks.
All the teams were contesting against each other to develop the best and most innovative technological product. The contest was judged by an external jury which included Rajul Garg, Venture Capitalist, Director, Sunstone Business school; Maninder Singh Grewal, MD, HeathFore Technologies; Subodh Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Magicbricks.com; Shalabh Nigam, Chief Technology Officer, Info Edge India Ltd and Udit Sawhney, Chief Technology Officer, Eduwizards Pvt. Ltd. upon business implication and innovation of the idea.
The winner of 30Hacks was judged to be team GL Mavericks from GlobalLogic. Their idea is to develop smart earphones that will know the difference between sounds that need to be blocked and the sounds that the users need to hear. Often, the workers laboring in noisy factory environments are given ear muffs to protect their ears from the high noise. This blocks out the noise, but it also prevents the workers from hearing warnings in case of emergency situations. This has led to several accidents. The innovative headphones developed by GL Mavericks can connect to user's smartphone to filter the noise and deliver only useful sounds to the users, while blocking out the noise. They deservedly won the first prize of 1 lack rupees.
The second prize was won by Team Xscension. They developed a product called Digito to help the users control their digital footprints. The third prize went to team Steria for developing a tool that could help the user in more convenient and secure banking and provide the facility of cardless ATM.
Talking about the event, Ms. A Nandini, VP Delivery GlobalLogic India said, "This was our first big hackathon in the northern region and our first external one. I hope this will be a precedent to many more innovative tech events in the upcoming years. Our expectations have multiplied exponentially due to the growing innovations and state-of-the-art inventions happening in the technology sector. Major revolutions like growing influence of digital age and internet of things is boosting the young minds to explore areas like network and connectivity. I hope the solutions and products at the end of this 30-hour long hackathon will secure successful partnerships and support 'Innovating by India and for India' mission."
