Hong Kong, China – How do you “Hack a Hackathon”? You take an existing 36-hour process, massively cut it down to 4 hours, and stir up intense competition! Whip in 5-star mentors to boost progress, throw in live-streaming into the mix and the result is a spiced up version of a Reality-TV Hackathon!
5 teams chose from 44 problem statements and raced to solve their selected problem in an intense 4-hour hackathon. Contestants showed off their pitches and prototypes to a panel of expert judges who evaluated on a combination of factors around innovation, go-to-market plans, and presentation.
“Students constantly tell us that they want to solve REAL problems. Existing Hackathons don’t do that and don’t give any actionable feedback on the output,” said Daniel, CEO of amazed. “We turned a Hackathon around by reducing the time and give guidance to validate if teams can work under pressure to come up with a product within a short time-frame.”
The teams were not alone. 15 superstar mentors with combined experience of more than 100 years from Microsoft, Reuters, Blockchain Foundry, and other 5 star companies rallied to help the students reach their goals. Mentors include Richard Hua, Data Science Advisor for amazed, Prasanna Mathiannal, co-founder of Blockchain Foundry, and Phil Aldrige, COO of FunctionEight Ltd. “Thank you for inviting us to this eye-opening event! It was exciting to see so many mentors unified in one event.”, said Sunny Si, from one of the competing teams.
The winning team “HERE – Personal Health Record”, looked to digitalize health records for private doctors to help secure medical records, speed up ordering of medicine and improve insurance underwriting. As part of the implementation, the team showed a QR Code scanning app that doctors are expected to use to store the health record. Coincidentally, all winning teams had solutions related to using Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Technology.
Students were pre-trained in technologies from Microsoft, Reuters and Blockchain Foundry to improve their chance of success. When Microsoft mentors learnt that students were keen to use Microsoft Azure for Machine Learning, they were thrilled. “At Microsoft, we want to bring AI to every developer so we can help you create the next generation of AI-powered applications.”, said Verlebie, Audience Evangelism Manager from Microsoft.
Prasanna Mathiannal closed with an introductory talk about Blockchain technology. “In an era of fascinating new technology like Blockchain, there has never been a greater need for a rapid prototyping platform where solutions can be developed, tested and deployed at lightning speed and Blockchain Foundry sets out to provide exactly that.”, he highlighted.
The winning teams earn a rigorous incubation process with private mentoring from amazed CEO Daniel, where teams will be exposed to and coached by the best minds in Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship to explore viability to bring the ideas to life.
Media Contact
Company Name: Amazed
Contact Person: Daniel Shen [CEO]
Email: danielshen@am-azed.com
Country: China
Website: www.am-azed.com