IDEAS and the Stanford Global Hackathon

On October 28th and 29th, Kambria sponsored the Stanford Global Hackathon in partnership with IDEAS, the International Data Engineering and Science Association. This was our second hackathon with IDEAS hosted at a major US university and an important part of Kambria’s effort to support the developer community.

The hackathon included competition in two major technologies — blockchain and data analytics — and welcomed both Coding/Developer Teams and startups in blockchain and data analytics. The Coding/Developer teams had two days to hack a project together before competing for prizes. And startups got to pitch their big ideas to 10+ top venture capital investors.

In addition, data analytics solutions from the hackathon will have the potential to be selected for further development and application within the retail vertical of Vingroup, the largest business conglomerate in Vietnam.

Kambria’s workshop at the event was led by Nik Kalyani, Co-founder and CTO of WhenHub, a blockchain-based app for person-to-person business micro-contracts. Nik shared his methodology for innovation with the group and encouraged them to challenge assumptions. “If you don’t change the status quo, you will not innovate.” Combine two ideas to make a new product. For example, Uber combined taxis and car ownership to come up with Uber. Gutenberg combined the wine press and a coin punch to make printed books.

With Nik’s instruction and support, all participants delivered awesome projects. The winner of the coding project developed smart contracts for founder equity allocation, which we are all impressed by!

And the winning startup pitch came from WallChain. Their project focused on a decentralized VPN. Here is a picture of Nik presenting the prize to WallChain team members.