By Sanjay Deo
More than 160 people have already registered for the PayPal Battle Hack Miami (http://battlehack.org/miami) event Aug. 24-25 at The LAB Miami. The registrants span all of South Florida universities, corporations and the greater development community. To the credit of Diane Sanchez, CEO of Technology Foundation of the Americas, Paypal agreed to host the Battle Hack in Miami, a competition among 10 global cities, and the winners from each city will compete in Silicon Valley for a $100,000 prize. Paypal has completed four cities (Berlin, New York, Tel Aviv and Seattle). Some of the winning apps so far are:
- * Clean Berlin made an easy to use application for iOS that enables Berliners to order a cleaning lady (and/or man) to clean up their appartments. The usability of the project was truly great and featured a really nice integration of PayPal's SDK.
- * New York: Team DropDeadAR won for their application that puts PayPal payments in both physical and artificial reality locations with virtual dead drops. The application allows a user or a business to leave money (virtually) in any location for someone to find using a mobile phone or Google Glass. The user needs to go to the location and identify the item to which the money is attached in order to pick it up and used a cutting edge augmented reality technology as well as PayPal to transfer the money.
- * LateBet is a mobile web application that allows to create dates and meetings with a friend from your social networks. Both parties commit on being on time at the arranged meeting point. If that is not the case the friend beign late has to pay 1 $ per minute being late and automatically transfers the total amount via PayPal to the punctual participant.
To promote the Paypal BattleHack Hackathon, we hosted two successful meetups at Nova University and The Beacon Council in the last couple of weeks. Previous Hackathon winners and experts Peter Martinez and Damian Montero gave an overview of the Paypal APIs, how to win a Hackathon and how to prepare for the Hackathon.
I encourage developers who haven’t already done so to register for the Paypal Battle Hack.
As we embark on this mission of showcasing MIAMI as a TechHub, we are planning for a number of other technology events, including other hackathons leading up to the eMerge Americas Conference on May 4-6, 2014 (http://emergeamericas.org/).
Sanjay Deo is founder and president of 24by7Security and a local organizer of Battle Hack Miami.