The Economic Times
Mobile applications for women’s safety, software to detect electoral fraud and solutions that help farmers improve cropproductivity were some of the technologies developed by coders this weekend.
The contest, Code for India, ran simultaneously for 24 hours on Google campuses in India and the United States.
Over 224 engineers at the contest focused on buildingtechnology solutions for non-profit organisations including the World Bank, Amnesty Intenational and American India Foundation to solve various challenges in India.
“Many people could have contributed money. However, putting in 24 hours of the effort can be far more impactful towards taking the social contribution forward,” said Pranav Tiwari, head of engineering at Google Bangalore.
Ashish Singhal, Rahul Bhatnagar , Rajagopal Natarajan and Sameer Goyal employees at online retailer Amazon developed a device that can help drones or unmanned aerial vehicles, identify survivors during a natural disaster. The technology that was built for the World Bank, equips citizens with a gadget that sends out signals to the drones.
Crime and safety was one of the most popular topics amongst the participants.
Mani Doraisamy, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who runs a technology startup developed a safety application for women which automatically send an alarm along with the video discreetly in case of an attack, by just shaking the phone. The application also sifts through huge chunks of data to caution people, when they are passing through an area notorious for crime.
Akshay Sharma, Rahul Raja and Kanav Anand, final year students at Vellore Institute of Technology also hacked an android application for non-profit organisation Zariya that is focused on prevention of violence against women. The app is designed for victims of violence as well as others who can report abuse by filling up a questionnaire related to place, date and time anonymously.
“It’s not always about creating something from scratch but it’s about connecting the dots,” said Rita Soni, chief executive of Nasscom Foundation, who is of the view that more experienced and skilled people like entrepreneurs and engineers from large technology companies are showing deep interest in solving such problems.
The hackathon saw interesting combinations within teams, where industry veterans teamed up with college students. Network engineer at Cisco and former TCS employee, Selva Ganapathy teamed up with Thejdeep Gudivada, currently in his third year in NIT, Karnataka and Bharath MG of Freshdesk, and developed an application aimed at crime prevention and safety. The app let’s people to share their location with family members and call emergency services instantly if they feel threatened. “You don’t need to open the app to use it. You just need to press the power button,” said Ganapathy.
