Pioneers Festival Hackathon 2012 – 24 hours of coding in Vienna

Nikola on

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Pioneers Festival is a three day event being held in Vienna, Austria from Octorber 29th to October 31st where startups, bloggers, investors and people from all over Europe come together and discuss the latest trends is technology, useful presentations are being held by some of the most influential speakers out there, startups will pitch to the investors and everyone will make some great and valuable connections there.

Prior to this years Pioneers Festival, organizers prepared a hackathon event (October 27-28th) with the help from the Erste Group and Amazon Web Services. Hackathon took place at a Sektor5 coworking space where developers had to develop their own financial mobile app. Of course, our team (Josip, Nikša and Goran) attended the hackathon and coded up the app prototype in 24 hours, starting on Saturday 27th at noon and finished the next day at 11.00 AM (DST switched during the night). Once the hackathon was done, all the teams had to pitch their app to the audience.

The hackathon itself was awesome and as we expected – it wasn’t all about the coding. Well, most of it is, however, we met some great people in Vienna and made some valuable connections there. Organizers were great – they know how hard it is to stay awake for 24 hours and work all day and all night so they’ve equipped us with great food, energy drinks and “developers fuel” in general!

Our project

Since the topic of the hackathon was financial mobile app, we have decided to build a wish list application which used location services to remind you, the user, about stuff you want or need. We’ve implemented the API in the app to allow users to log onto their bank accounts and created a new authentication system for it – no more PIN codes and passwords – with our app you can authenticate yourself by using gestures!

We have also implemented augmented reality view – you can simply scan your bank card and the app will do some communication with the bank and show you the balance of the associated bank account.

24 hours and a bunch of code later – we can say that we’re very happy we participated on Pioneers Hackathon – it was a great excercise for the team, a great experience and a great team building which we’d recommend to all dev-teams out there! Vienna is such a lovely place to visit so if you’ve missed the hackathon this year, keep an eye out for the next Pioneers Hackathon event!

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