Fall 2015 hackNY Student Hackathon Winners Wow the Crowd at the New York Tech Meetup
Two winning teams from the Fall 2015 hackNY Student Hackathon presented their projects at the November New York Tech Meetup this Tuesday. Team Roam, our First Place winners, and team Lights, Camera, Location, winners of the 8-Breaker creativity prize, demoed as smoothly and impressively as the startups on the program. After their demos, they answered questions from the audience about their technical processes and plans for the future.Here's a full video of the NYTM demo lineup. Skip to 47:08 for the hackNY demos! You can also view all the photos from the night on NYTM's Facebook page here.
One of the most fun recurring patterns for demos at @NYTM is that @hackNY apps built in 24 hrs consistently blow away huge funded startups.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) November 4, 2015
Roam, a team of Stony Brook students Amit Bapat, Bethann Polinsky, Philippe Kimura-Thollander, and Varun Sayal (Bethann wan't able to attend the meetup), impressed us at the hackathon with their Android app that allows users to get directions, check the weather, and call an Uber all without using phone data or wifi. Their polished app hides the details of interacting with APIs using SMS, and presents data beautifully and naturally.
Lights, Camera, Location's team, Alina Lalji and Zain Hemani of the University of Western Ontario, flew all the way from Toronto to present their hack. Their app scrapes internet databases all over the Web to provide filming location data for any movie you search - all in under 9 seconds. The NYTM audience especially enjoyed their visualization of NYC filming locations.
After the demos and Q&A, the hackers attended the NYTM afterparty where they talked with attendees about their projects with cake and swag. Many of their visitors had to ask again how long they'd spent on the projects, barely able to believe that they'd completed so much in 24 hours! We are very proud of our hackers, and hope to see them again at future hackNY events.