Back in August, Team YellowPepper won PayPal’s Battle Hack Miami. Judges chose the team to represent Miami in the Battle Hack World Finals, where it would compete against the winners of nine other teams –- Berlin, New York City, Tel Aviv, Seattle, Moscow, Austin, London, Washington, D.C. and Barcelona. Now here’s the rest of the story.
The two-day World Finals were held at PayPal headquarters in San Jose, Calif., this weekend, and our team from Miami -- Alexander Sjögren of YellowPepper and Jose Pimienta and Osniel Gonzalez of Vinylfy (pictured here) -– won third place in the global hackathon for LoanPal, an app for peer-to-peer lending service.
The $100,000 grand-prize winner of the Battle Hack Series was the team from Moscow (Sergey Pronin, Alexander Balabna, Bayram Annakov and Oksana Tretiakova) who created an app called Donate Now, which allows anyone to instantly donate to a cause in the moment. Second place went to team Tel Aviv (Dañny Leshém, Yaniv Ben Zaken, Maya Marom and Yoav Amit) for RunPal, an app that connects users with other runners around the world to encourage them to get running. Said John Lunn, Global Director of PayPal’s Developer Network, in announcing the news: “We truly believe that developers can help change the world.”