Tech Assessment

Superhero movies and super successful companies have one thing in common. They both have a great team that strives to win, no matter what the challenge is. It is always the hero’s team that saves the day.

A challenge like a hackathon is no different. At hackathons, teams of developers, designers, and product managers work together to build prototypes and solve real-world problems within a specific time frame. The team that works the most efficiently and builds the best solution takes home the prize. Getting the right people on board gives your team a competitive advantage over others. Here are the top tips to form a winning team for your next hackathon:

1) Start your hunt early

Start looking for teammates from the time you decide to participate in a hackathon. Search for potential teammates on online platforms and communities like Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, and Quora. Start with your own network of friends and like-minded acquaintances. You can also find other hackers on meetups and developer groups. Further, hackathons conducted on platforms like HackerEarth allow participants to form teams on the platform itself.

2) Work on your pitch

To attract talented people to your team, you need to sell your idea and your profile well. Update your Github profile and create a good pitch to share with potential teammates. Showcase your past projects. Highlight your skills and domain knowledge. Explain your idea and the problem that you plan to solve. Be proactive in pitching your idea and listen to feedback. Even if you arrive at the hackathon alone, with a good pitch, you still have a good chance of forming a great hackathon team.

3) Seek diversity

Diversity is what makes Avengers, the team of superheroes great as a team. Each member brings a unique strength to the table. While forming your hackathon team, hunt for talent from diverse domains like designing, frontend development, business management, etc. Having a team of people with diverse skill sets will help you in building a complete product.

4) Be aware of different working styles

Different people work differently and have different approaches to solving the same problem. Assign tasks and roles to team members based on their core strengths. Give everyone a fair chance to work on specific tasks which they are good at. Encourage mutual learning and problem-solving. Getting the chemistry right is the key to a successful team. If you have the time to prepare, do a mock run with your team to plan tasks and organize yourselves better as a team.

‘Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.’?—?Ed Catmull, previously CEO of Pixar, author of Creativity, Inc.

A good team adapts well to any situation. Your final prototype is a result of your team’s work. By forming a good team, you can build better products and improve your chances of winning a hackathon.

Got a tip for building stronger hackathon teams? Share it with us in the comments below.

The IT landscape as we know it is getting redefined every day. Change is constant. The need of the hour for tech companies, big and small, is to innovate fast and keep up with the change. Innovation was the main focus ofIndiaHacks 2017, HackerEarth’s country-wide hackathon, aimed atbuilding software products to transform the world.

Thousands of submissions were received from developers across the country.The hackathon had three tracks – Internet of Things, Fintech, and AI. Based on the first offline session conducted in three regional zones – Delhi, Pune, and Bangalore, 10 finalists were chosen for each track. Thirty finalists participated in the offline hackathon conducted on the 8th and 9th of September in Bangalore.

In the final round, teams built some incredible apps and prototypes.We are happy to present the winning hacks of IndiaHacks 2017:

Winners in Internet of Things (IOT)

1) License Integrated Safety Device

The License Integrated Safety Device is a UUID-based vehicle tracking system that addresses the growing need for delivering effective safety, traffic control, and pollution control. The technology can act as a first responder management service in smart cities.

Application:

• The system comes with hardware that mimics access control system for automobiles. This prevents any unauthorized access.
• The device tracks the user’s coordinates when on the move. This information can be aggregated to a cloud- based system, allowing companies to gain insights and provide value-added services for smart city management.
• The data can also be consolidated into a city surveillance system to manage traffic by prioritizing user’s needs and routing optimally.

1ST Prize winners:

Team Name: Team_Anonymous

Submission Theme: Smart Driving Experience

Team Members: Sohail Chamadia, Kunal sharma

2) Real-time assistant for badminton players

The real-time assistant is a wearable device that enables players to know their fitness level and match readiness by analyzing their “smash” profiles. This profile has fitness details such as calorie intake, fluid intake, workout before sessions, and performance level of players. The device comes with an Arduino Nano, GY521 accelerometer, a sound sensor, and a Bluetooth HC-05. The device can help badminton players in the following ways:

• It calculates the player’s fitness level including the power generated by hand, the jump intensity, and the smash speed.
• It helps players to know their physical strength before a match.
• It provides insights players can use to adjust their fitness routine and improve their performance.

2nd Prize winners

Team Name: Smashlytics

Submission Theme: Smart Wearables

Team Members: Dey Subhankar

3) GPS and IoT-based soldier tracking and health indication system

The low-cost, wearable device based on IoT is equipped with biosensors. The device offers a reliable system to guard the lives of soldiers. The system can help locate and monitor the health of soldiers in combat. The main applications of the software are as follows:

• With IoT, armed forces can know the location of their soldiers directly on a smart phone.
• The technology can help monitor the health and ammunition of the soldiers in combat.
• GSM module can be used for effective high-speed transmission, short-range, and soldier-to-soldier wireless communications.

3rd Prize winners

Team Name: Tech_Monsters

Submission Theme: Smart Wearables

Team Members: Jasvinder Singh Chhabra, Ritesh Agarwal

Winners in Fintech

1) TechnoFin – A simple solution to financial problems

With time-series modelling, and predictive analysis, TechnoFin serves as a full-fledged financial recommendation engine. It addresses all the problems related to investing in stock market, real-estate, gold, and banking. The model can be used to predict the following:

• Stock prices with high accuracy and help in the comparison of stocks.
• Real-estate prices, and gold prices.

1ST Prize winners:

Team Name: FIN_ishers

Submission Theme: Financial Advisory

Team Members: Avinash G Kori, Akhil Poojary

2) MoneyMultiplier

Money Multiplier, an app integrated with Watson Conversation, aims to educate the financially illiterate. The app helps in the analysis of monthly account statement, and the monthly limit for savings. It also helps in understanding the Net Asset Value (NAV) of mutual funds.

Details of 2nd Prize winners

Team Name: ENSPIRE

Submission Theme: Financial Inclusion

Team Members: Suhit Kalubarme, Harish Shridhar Khot

3) Security for financial transactions

The ML-based security software aims to make transactions safer by identifying and tracking user behavior. Using Apache Lucene-based Elastic search or Solr engine, the software stores transactional data and identifies user pattern.

Details of 3rd Prize winners

Team Name: Secure_You

Submission Theme: Security

Team Members: Yadu Mathur, Sandhya SG

Winners in ArtificialIntelligence (AI )

1) Smart Courses

The smart online learning software uses smart image recognition recommendation system to evaluate facial expressions of students and then operates accordingly. The system can also be equipped with a smart assistant or chatbot to answer user queries.

1ST Prize winners:

Team Name: Zodiac

Submission Theme: Recommendation system

Team Members: Rishabh Malik, Aniket Sharma

2) Genre-switching music recommendation system

The recommendation software specializes in giving a good mix of genres based on the correlation established between the tapped genres using reinforcement learning.

2nd Prize winners

Team Name: Mad_Men

Submission Theme: Recommendation system

Team Members: Abhinav Anurag, Nitikesh Bhad

3) Bot104

BOT 104 tracks the number of beds available in nearby hospitals and helps users to book hospital beds easily. The software also has a feature to generate auto bills using QR codes.

3rd Prize winners

Team Name: Krypton

Submission Theme: Chatbots

Team Members: Jayesh Bidani, simran kaur

Winners of Online Challenge:

The programming and machine learning challenges were conducted online. Participants had to solve challenges online within a limited time frame. We are happy to present the winners of the online challenges of IndiaHacks 2017:

Winners of Machine Learning Challenge:

1st Prize winner:Bishwarup Bhattacharjee

2nd Prize winner:Siddharth Chandrakant

3rd Prize winner:Phani Srikanth

Winners of Programming Challenge:

1st Prize winner:Gennady Korotkevich

2nd Prize winner:Shik Chen

3rd Prize winner:Yuhao Du

A hackathon is a great platform for developersto network, showcase their talent, and learn new skills. It is one of the best ways tobuild your portfolio, grow your professional network, and become a better programmer.

If you think about it, your business is actually a community of sorts. And, if you do it right, your brand can create a community of ardent followers. If it thrives, you can expect tremendous business growth.

Creating a viral, self-sustaining strategy

Companies like Google and Facebook are open sourcing their core platform libraries for people on GitHub. Not only does GitHub, the largest open source community in the world, allow these companies to boost their tech credibility but it also fosters innovation by getting the best programmers to drive innovation.

Although open source may not be a business model on its own, it is great for improving user adoption and market value. Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner, said, “Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS (open source software) solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently–if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage.”

Let’s look at a few examples of how Google communities are changing the world while moving its business ahead. Google Product forums connect their product teams with actual users. The community conversations spawn new product features; they are also helping forums where participants ask questions and exchange advice. Google Translate Community invites polyglots to translate or validate existing translations; the company’s paid-version API is available to companies who require multi-lingual support. Contributors to Google Local Guides, a community-driven program, help others (and Google) by reviewing places they have been to. These guides impact navigation with the information and photos they share.

When it comes to new technologies, developer communities hold the key to enabling businesses. Google engages with the developer community via its developer programs—Google Developer Groups (to engage with a wide range of developers for new platform adoption and demand generation), Google Developers Experts (to identify people who are strong in a few technologies and make them engage with local communities rather than them putting Googlers all across the map), and Google Business Groups (to help SMEs).

Companies such as HackerEarth and HackerRank also nurture developer communities. They connect skilled programmers and tech companies looking to source top talent to drive product innovation. This translates into appreciable savings in terms of hiring efforts, time, and money, that is, better returns in the future for companies who sign up for their offerings. For example, HackerEarth has a community of over a million programmers. Their participation helps companies drive innovation and talent management on the platform.

Building a positive feedback loop

There is no better way to drive your business forward than happy customers who become advocates, helping you get more potential promoters. For example, studies show that glowing customer recommendations on Twitter can increase business for that brand by about 50%.

How do companies attract and retain customer loyalty, differentiate in a highly competitive market, and get customers to be brand advocates? Community! Their community teams focus on the customer. They listen to the customer. They create amazing social experiences that encourage customer interactions. And they know that quality, authenticity, and respect are the cornerstones of any successful community strategy.

You have mobile phone companies such as OnePlus and Xiaomi. They, leverage their community forums and social media to create a huge buzz during product launches, consequently investing much lesser, and sometimes even zero dollars, on advertising. These communities offer loads of product feedback as well. Their user communities do it all in exchange for product invites, merchandise, and invites to exclusive events. Building close-knit communities or tech evangelists have clearly propelled business for these Chinese companies.

Putting together a branded online community

A branded community is an example of co-creation where the company and the consumers create and find value. “A brand community is a community with a specific business objective lead by an executive sponsor, where a company creates a space for people with a common sense of identity to participate in ongoing, shared experiences.”

Why do companies need a branded online community?

• Retention and customer satisfaction
• Product feedback/ideation for the future/review beta products
• Enhance brand awareness, credibility, and exposure
• Generate revenue
• Create a cost-effective, simple marketing channel
• Support brand advocates
• Less investment in support staff and call centers
• Cross-promotion

An oft-quoted example of a branded community propelling business is Austria-based Red Bull through relevant social and digital campaigns. Synonymous with adventure, the energy drink company “got its wings” through strategic sponsorships (motor, alpine, and extreme sports) and celebrity endorsements, pull marketing strategies through interesting, emotional and authentic content, and attracting customers through quality merchandise. By glorifying everything that’s visible and not mainstream, Red Bull’s community of student entrepreneurs has fortified the brand’s perception by millennials through creative and daring initiatives across campuses. (Read how top community managers ensure that they have a thoroughly engaged audience via social platforms.)

Thriving on user-generated content

At times, a community of people creates the value while the business creates a platform. For example, Airbnb, Feastly, Lyft, and Duolingo, which have user-generated community strategies, are scaling rapidly. For instance, using amazing storytelling to “sell an experience” and great social campaigns driving fan engagement, Airbnb, an online marketplace, and hospitality service, set the sharing economy’s P2P marketplace model rolling. With more than 800,000 listings in about 200 countries, disruptive Airbnb could well ensure that the company will make $3.5 billion a year by 2020. With Duolingo, which is an online language-learning tool, the community helps in translation (that’s how it earns revenue), beta testing, and development of new course content via the Incubator.

Tools such as Jive and Higher Logic offer cloud-based community platforms for external engagement. Research shows that companies using online communities can expect 94% customer retention, 54% drive in revenue growth, and 88% increased web traffic. Whereas, Wells Fargo and NASA are keen on building internal communities for value creation; this is still in comparatively nascent stages.

Social has changed almost everything

According to 2014 study of online communities by Demand Metric and DNN, close to 20% of the participants reported that their online branded community impacted over 30% of the company revenues. And, data revealed these additional insights — in online communities that influence 16% or more of revenue, 64% have strong community engagement, 54% use intermediate or advanced metrics, and 69% have executive teams that are highly involved in the community.

Community engagement is a key ROI metric. Social platforms such as Instagram, Imgur, and others have strong community teams that work on engagements with users over and outside their platform. Instagram Co-founder Mike Krieger said, “What distinguishes us is a community. Staying tuned in is really the key. From the beginning, our very first hire – this is, like, against every business textbook [and everyone else in the business world’s advice] of hiring engineers, [and] like, maybe hir[ing] some designers and PMs. We hired a community manager first…” He attributes much of the photo-sharing platform’s stupendous success to the community. Imgur is an another platform completely driven by viral images which are again contributed by its community.

Product discovery platforms, such as Wooplr, Product Hunt, and Influenster, help businesses grow through community-driven curation; a close-knit community hunts for and reviews products to up sales and brand awareness. This is the sole form of content Product Hunt generates. (Ryan, the CEO of the company, has shared some thoughts here.)

According to CMX, the SPACE model defines how businesses can drive value through communities.

If you are customer-facing business, you need a community. You need to continuously nurture that connection with your consumers. This you do for gathering feedback on products or services (e.g. UserVoice), acting as support forums for queries/complaints (e.g. Uber uses Zendesk), and designing effective customer acquisitions and retention campaigns (e.g. HootSuite uses Influitive). Or, the community is your business. Either way, they are inextricably connected.

Conclusion

Businesses can’t sustain without connections. And what is a community but a bunch of valuable connections? For smaller businesses, especially, the decentralized, sustainable, and scalable concept of “community” can build trusted relationships with people who share their goals, thereby boosting business.

Community members soldier on, fueled by passion, to build new things and create an impact for people and organizations. There’s a reason community of fans such as Lego Ideas, HOG, and Made Unboxed flourish. They are indisputable social engines to power business growth; perhaps a community is one of the most vital corporate assets to help create lifetime value.

Hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section down below. More content to follow around building great community, so stay tuned!

“Just keep it simple, silly!”

It is often both exciting and intimidating while starting to learn new stuff, but it is also the only way to keep us updated, with one foot in the future.

Although there is so much of frenzy around Mixed Reality these days, there are really very few developers currently working on AR/VR.

While there already is a lot of shortage of tech talent worldwide, the scales of demand and supply are even more skewed in this particular category.

Here is all that you need to know to start building your first application for Virtual Reality:

Start by Exploring

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Before you sit down and start developing, you’ll need to know a little bit about the ecosystem itself and the scope of the technology in the current landscape. You do that by spending enough time exploring new applications and following relevant industry insiders, developers, and media channels who are already neck deep in the stuff and listen to what they have to say.

For more information on getting started with virtual reality, go here.

Get your tools right

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Don’t worry about having the latest and most expensive VR Gear in the beginning. Just get yourself a $10 Google Cardboard; that’ll be enough to get you started. Also, do not download the latest version of Unity or Google VR as they usually come with several bugs and need a lot of fixing which at the beginning might leave you stumped. Go for the most stable build out there.

The most stable build at the time of publishing of this article is:
Unity3d 5.4.2: Unity – Get Unity – Download Archive
Google VR 1.03: Google VR SDK for Unity

(To download GVR 1.03: Go to the above link. Then, click on “33 commits” under where it says Google VR SDK for Unity and above where it says Branch: master.

Where it says GVR Unity SDK v1.0.3, click on the “< >” button on the far right. That takes you to a version of the repository from a previous date, v1.0.3 in this case.

Finally, click on the green “Clone or download button” and select Download Zip.

*It’ll be a big file of size around 800 MB, but you’ll just need the Unity package which is about 50 MB; you’ll have to download the complete file though, then delete the rest of it later.)

Form a routine

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You might have classes or a job, but if you don’t take some time out every day, then with each day that you don’t get hands on the tools, it will push you back a lot and the next time you open the tools, you might have a hard time figuring out where you left. You might have to start all over again!

What I did and what I recommend is committing at least half an hour each day to familiarizing yourself with the gaming engine you’re working on whether you are able to make significant progress each day or not.

Also, so that you don’t lose focus and interest along the way, I suggest you form a small group of 3–5 friends who are also interested in the space on Whatsapp, Facebook, or wherever you like and make it a point to share at least one article that you come across each day in that group. It will force you to develop a habit of reading something related every day. Do it even if nobody else seems to be participating.

Practice, Practice, Practice

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This is a no brainer; most development on VR depends on how well you know your gaming engine (Unity in this case) and a little bit of programming. And no matter what you think you’ll typically have to put in at least 40–50 hours of productive time on getting a hang of these tools before you can really start building your own stuff. A lot of tutorials are available online which will guide you while making your first application without much of a background.

I suggest that you read as many tutorials as you can to understand these tools. You will be deceiving yourself if you believe that you’ve got the hang of the tools the first time you follow the tutorial and what you create will actually work. You’ll soon discover that it will be hard for you to recall any of it a day or two later, Don’t pull out your hair if your application doesn’t come up as they taught in the tutorial, as what’ll happen most of the time is you’ll have different machines, different SDKs, and different versions of packages that you’ll be using. So, it will be only natural if something doesn’t work quite as it does in the tutorial.

Combinatory Approach

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Do what you know. After spending some time on the tutorials, you’ll have learned a couple of tricks and will be comfortable implementing some of the functionalities really well. Just focus on that and nothing else. Don’t go into your first project with a specific idea. ?Learn what you can do and design an application around that. Don’t let a specific idea bog you down. Remember this, your first project is supposed to be something of a disaster, and there is no shame in accepting that. You’ll get only better from there.

Start small

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Learn that complex applications are made with huge teams over a long duration. Starting off the first time, you might not necessarily have the correct frame of reference of how long it is going to take you to build stuff, so don’t plan any project which you think is going to take more than a couple of weeks. For example, if you’re building a game like Mario, then do so by stripping all the unnecessary items like keeping it to just one level only without any enemies to dodge or points to collect and other additional conditions; just focus on the minimum number of things that will make it work, say, setting the environment and making your player jump and move. You’ll be surprised that the first time around even this is going to take you a huge amount of time. You can always add things later on. Your first application is going to take you an amount of time that is cumulative of all the practice time that you put in and even more. But just stick to it and your routine; it is a part of the process and don’t be afraid to write a little bit of code. If you design it right, you’ll need to do very little of coding anyway to get anything done.

Don’t worry about making it look pretty; worry about it working at all

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When you are just getting started, you’ll want to go in with the idea of everything being perfect. Just make a note that it is anyway going to be time consuming and also difficult the first time, so do not waste your energy trying to make it look good, just keep striving toward making it work at all. The first ever VR application that I built on my own was very rudimentary, yet it took me about a month to build it, and a lot of time was spent figuring out small details. When you get started, you’ll realize that most of the time it will be the small stuff that keeps you from moving ahead. Sometimes, things won’t work because a library that you’re working on doesn’t exist anymore or because an update in the SDK makes a lot of what you’ve done irrelevant. This is part of the process as well, allowing you to learn the details of the process of building.

Here is the link of the application that I built:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Pratham.ShootemVR

The project it open source, use it to learn and build if you want to. Here is the link to the assets: https://github.com/pratham2504/Shoot-em-VR

Set milestones

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Even though it sounds obvious, you’ll be surprised how easy is it to let days go by without getting much stuff done. Setting small daily milestones will help. Don’t wait if you are not making progress; just ask around or in sometime you’ll convince yourself that it is not working and just quit. Use forums and repositories such as Stackoverflow or Unity Community resources or just ask people at random who’s working on similar things. Most of the time, you’ll find help.

Just remember, anything worth doing is a struggle but if you stick to it, you’ll eventually get there.

And have fun while learning and building cool stuff. You’ll be glad when you show what you built to your friends for the first time even if it may not look all that pretty.

Excited about VR?

Register at the UnitedByHCl hackathon
Happy mixing reality!

• Built-in WiFi
• 4 USB ports
• 1 HDMI 2.0
• 1 MicroSD card slot
• 40 GPIO pins
• A 3.5mm audio jack
• 1 Micro USB for power