Following 14 regional Battlehack competitions around the globe, Paypal and Braintree awarded the 2015 Battlehack grand prize of $100,000 to a team from Venice, Italy at the global finals held at PayPal’s headquarters in Silicon Valley in mid November.
Battlehack is a 24-hour event during which competing teams build an application incorporating the PayPal, Braintree or Venmo application program interfaces (APIs). The Venice team’s project, ifCar, used both hardware and software that included sensors, environmental data and user preferences to create a smarter car. Potential uses include: safer parking, monitoring of children and pets, and preventing car threat, according the event’s press release.
“We are so excited to have won the grand prize from Braintree and PayPal in our first year participating in the competition,” said winning team upon receiving their award. Their hack was tied to their participation in the World Final during which they received parking tickets as a result of confusion in understanding the many parking regulations.
Now in its third year the Global Battlehack 2015 regional competitions were held in Athens, Berlin, New York City and Tokyo, among others. In each of the cities winners were chosen by a panel of local developers and technologists who judged projects based on execution, idea and use of the app. Winning teams were flown to the finals in San Jose. The judging panel included local developers, technologists and influencers.
“We created BattleHack to help us inspire, encourage and uncover amazing developers from across the world, and our teams at PayPal and Braintree were blown away by the talent we saw throughout this year’s BattleHack series,” Senior Director of Development and Startup Relations for Braintree John Lunn said.
