Last July 1 to 2, A-SPACE in Makati became home a very exciting event as the country’s upcoming tech stars gave rise to 19 original, feasible and sustainable pitches that aims to address a problem, want, or need in the Philippine market.
AngelHack’s fifth year in the Philippines was made possible by Smart Development Network (SmartDevNet), the telco’s developer community program. AngelHack is the world’s largest and most diverse global hacker community, which helps to drive innovation for platforms, tech products, and brands which show extraordinary smarts, scale, and speed.
As a pioneer of global hackathons for more than four years, AngelHack’s over 97,000 developers, designers, and entrepreneurs battle it out to build, test, and launch new solutions over the course of a weekend.
From a pool of 19 teams, three emerged as winners along with one Voyager Innovation API Special Prize Winner.
First Prize went to Team PocketMarket for creating a platform called “Mined,” which makes use of artificial intelligence elements such as chat bot, voice recognition, and document authentication to improve the customer service aspect of an enterprise.
The team is composed of freelance business developer Constant Wakayo, and software engineer Mark Panizales. What’s interesting is that both contestants came solo, and ended up working with each other.
“We came here as a solo participant, and then we just met, and we formulated everything … and we didn’t expect to have this win.” – Mark Panizales.
“It is my very first time to join a hackathon. We decided to focus on the current IT trend in the market, like more on artificial intelligence.” – Constant Wakayo.
Second prize was won by Team Coco Marteam composed of Jeno Panganiban, Juan Simeon, Kevin Motas, and John Raphael Aquino for their incentivized voluntary road surveillance reporting system named “Oboseen.” Third prize went to Team Konzole composed of Lionette Baclagon, Clarissa Tamayo, Willy David, Jr., and Mark Sayson for “Konzole,” a recruitment accelerator platform.
The Voyager Special Prize was won by Team CodeBuddy for a virtual parking assistant named EVA.
Paulo Pajo, Smart’s Senior Manager for Digital Platforms and Product Development and SmartDevNet Developer Evangelist, shared his confidence on the developer community in the country.
“We believe that Filipinos have the capability and technology to become world-class developers or startups. This is our way of opening the door for everyone who thinks they have an innovation that might benefit a lot of Filipino people.” – Paulo Pajo, Smart’s Senior Manager for Digital Platforms and Product Development and SmartDevNet Developer Evangelist
The winning team brought home an exclusive invite to HACKcelerator, a 12-week curriculum to help them turn their idea into a startup reality, as well as a chance to fly to Silicon Valley for Annual Demo Play and a week of intensive training with access to a diverse network of both local and global mentors.
AngelHack was also made possible by IMB, Amazon Web Services, Code for a Cause, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Gortech Alliance, Voyager Innovations and PayMaya.
Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.