On My View 'YGC 2014'

Yarl Geek Challenge 2014

I always look out to participate on few events, hackathon is one of them. I was there at Yarl Geek Challenge organised by Yarl IT Hub last weekend. There were two hackathon categories, Yarl Geek Challenge senior and junior.

Yarl Geek Challenge Junior is a school level IT competition organised to encourage school children to use their creativity and create IT solutions. This year’s competition was based on the following areas: Mobile Computing,  Web and Hardware.

I was impressed by Junior category the most. First, the enthusiasm they had shown. There were few teams from Velanai Central College even it was their college day. Second the competency level. few teams developed static websites, some customised Joomla (CRM), The team "INQURTIME" did exceptionally well in terms of idea and specially technology choice, and they were the only team utilized "EC2" offered by Cloud Technology Partner Amazon Web Services. Third and important point, every team had a real need for them to develop these solutions. Interestingly there was one hardware project as well, using open source hardware Arduino and LDR.

Seniors category too, had interesting things. what's special with seniors challenge is not only the winning team but also any team has a chance to get funded by Blue Ocean Ventures. All the teams had nice ideas and each of them were different from another. On technical perspective ideas were really good but market niche?. I found that teams have chosen their technology that make them prominent in crowd or they are comfortable with first, then they come up with the problem that they can solve with the technology in hand. ultimately they ended up with a poor business plan. this was not the place to show only your technology strengths because you are asked to present it in front of investors. bending your business ideas to fit your chosen technology will never survive as a business. seniors did not use the platform properly and this is why I like juniors category most.

Sponsors: Dialog Ideamart, hSenid, WSO2, Creative Solutions, 99X Technologies. It was great to see my current employer in sponsors list, my last employer is busy achieving billion dollar target. There were presentations by the sponsors who were sponsoring this event for the last 3 years, WSO2 and hSenid. hSenid presentation included a small video depicting the work environment. WSO2, had plain presentation slides. It would be better if they had played a video; an extract from "WSO2Con 2011-WSO2: Disrupting the middleware industry" will do.