Microsoft Ventures’ first ever HackDay in Bangalore generates cool apps

Microsoft Ventures in India organized its first-ever “HackDay” on Saturday, November 9th in Bangalore. HackDays, HackNights and Hackathons are typically organized by big technology companies, inviting developers to build hacks on their APIs – but this is the first time startups got a chance to showcase their APIs to the developer community and we loved facilitating this.  Our portfolio companies benefitted because giving them an interim milestone for development helped them work faster toward their own long-term goals. And for the first time external developers had a chance to play with cutting edge technology being created by our startups, and also got a birds-eye view into Microsoft Ventures. Some of the hackers are also likely to receive job offers from our startups.

Developers were invited to hack on APIs of six of our portfolio companies - Cloudinfra, Frrole, Native5, Nanobi, NowFloats and SupportBee. Developers got access to the latest and most innovative technologies being developed by these companies. All the company co-founders were around to help and advise the hackers.

“Our objective was to enable developers with working knowledge of HTML5 to create applications across platforms. Over the course of 6 hours, Native5 Platform successfully enabled three group of developers, not just to create but deploy applications on desktop and mobile,” said Kunal Abhishek, co-founder of Native5.

We used HasGeek’s Hacknight platform for registrations and the free event was oversubscribed within days!  There were 200 subscriptions for the event – 65 per cent of the participants were students and 35 per cent were a mix of young professionals. The event started early in the day. After a brief introduction to each of the six companies’ APIs, the developers made their choices, split up into teams of about 3-5 people each and started hacking soon after.

A total of 17 teams were formed – the overall enthusiasm on the floor was very high. None of the teams were seen dropping out or slacking off at any time. Including a short lunch break, the teams were hacking non-stop till 6 pm after which they presented their hacks to our team of judges-- Pradeep Banavara, Technology Lead at Microsoft Ventures, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Founder of HasGeek and Mrinal Jain, Integrated Systems Sales Specialist and Cloud Computing expert at IBM.  Each hack was evaluated on the following criteria--technology, design, value proposition, inspiration and completeness. Finally, after several rounds of debate, the judges picked five winning hacks while a sixth almost made the cut. These six are: