Find - Hack-a-startup - second place
When I approached the Hackastartup event I had no idea what was in store for the following 24 hours. I went into the competition with a team of three undergraduate coders and a designer.
We were all behind the idea "Find". Find was to be a mobile application that allowed individuals to located groceries within a physical shopping center based on a grid of low energy bluetooth beacons.
At the beginning of the Hackathon anyone with an idea was asked to go up and present the idea in front of the entire audience of participants. After pitching "Find" and moving on to a recruitment/selection stage the participants were asked to vote and network with one another to find group members.
Hatch - Tartanhacks - first place GoDaddy award
For Tartanhacks (CMU's largest Hackathon) our team came together to build an idea I had thought of earlier in the year called Hatch. We built a concept model for a competitive crowdfunding concept called Hatch.
Because there is little space and low success rates in the smaller projects on existing crowdfunding platforms I decided to approach the issue through a new economic model. Hatch works on the principle of individuals buying into existing pools of funding with similar interests.
Once pools are filled with applicants and their monetary bids the selection process is left up to a voting system specifically designed to remove any sort of collusion. The top three candidates have distributed their earnings after the voting is over so that they can execute their project. Hatch offers a new medium for anyone to secure a chance at crowdfunding their project to life.
Simple Security - HackCMU - first place GoDaddy award
Simple security was a project that I came up with for my first Hackathon. The idea took advantage of the fact that many people have old smartphones lying around. My team and I decided that we would create an enclosure and coexisting mobile application that could turn a smartphone into a cloud-connected security camera. Every time the camera detected that someone came into the room, the device would snap a picture of the individual, and upload it to the cloud.