Last month, we held a company-wide Hackathon.
This is an event we try to hold every few months with a goal to let creativity and innovation thrive. The first Hackathon was held as an internal R&D activity, but since then, it has grown to be a company-wide event – offices around the world join by submitting ideas, viewing the competing team presentations and demonstrations, and voting on the submissions to select a winner.
This time, 17 teams joined the race. Each team had 24 hours to come up with a working demo of their idea, which would be shared via video conference to the whole company.
Teams worked around the clock to meet this goal with late night sessions fueled by sheer willpower (and of course, abundant pizza and caffeine).
The demos were great. They varied from sophisticated new ways to optimize campaigns, to cool looking user experience concepts, to using a new big-data platform to solve some of our toughest problems.
We are now working on integrating some of these ideas into the product, while others will benefit from continued discussion and brainstorming.
There are some cool ideas already waiting for the next Hackathon, and we can’t wait to see what our contributors will think of next!