Deal Easy wins hackathon

Hyderabad: Kony today wrapped up a three-day Hackathon/App Challenge at Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology (SNIST) in Hyderabad, India, during which the winning team of students was given job offers from the Kony team on-site.

Dr Aruna Varanasi, Professor and Head of CSE - SNIST coordinated for the Hackathon, first of its kind in SNIST to enhance employability. The Executive Director of the college Dr P Narasimha Reddy and Dr T Ch Sivareddy in their presidential address in the inaugural function, exhorted on the students to take advantage of the opportunity given by Kony. And if you think that’s pretty cool, the Hackathon itself was great all around.

The event started with 10 days of virtual training. Before the actual three-day Hackathon, students from the college were invited to take free 10 days of virtual training to learn and understand the Kony AppPlatform. Overall, around 150 students nominated themselves for training. Over the course of those ten days, students were told to complete the free virtual training and then submit a two-page sample app to qualify for the actual Hackathon.

Out of 150, only 18 students qualified to play the App Challenge. So we made 6 teams with 3 people on each team. Students were allowed to come up with their own app ideas; we did not restrict them to themes. They had full freedom to decide what kind of app they wanted to create and to complete the challenge. On the first of the event we called students to show their ideations to a team of panelists, which included three people from the Kony product team and 2 from the college. The second half of the day students were allowed to start coding and building their apps.

On second-day students continued with coding. Mentors from Kony were around on all three days to unblock students and provide assistance. On the third-day students had to demo the app in front of the panelists and showcased their work. Afterwards, we announced the results and gave job offer letters to all 3 winning team members. The rest of the teams got goodies and giveaways.

The winning team created a CRM app called “Deal Easy,” which (very simplistically, for obvious reasons) is an app built for retailers and distributors that allows them to communicate with one another. The second place team created an Accurate Positioning System app, and the third place team created a Micro Finance app. In other words, these students came up with some fantastic ideas and executed on them in three very short days.