It's 9am in the morning, 29 teams waiting in line and Justin's in front of the queue getting his pictures taken for being one of the first 6 to arrive (the first six teams get their own private room). Fatefully enough, we're exactly 6th in line!
The aim of the Masters of Code challenge was to come up with an app idea that uses commerce technology to connect people around the world. We had to incorporate their featured API which was the MasterCard MasterPass Merchant Checkout API and their secret API, Express Checkout API, which was only later revealed.
Upon hearing the brief, we beelined to our office space and started brainstorming ideas on the whiteboard. We figured that many teams would think of commerce in a traditional sense. To differentiate ourselves, we decide to tackle the challenge from a different angle.
We came up with the idea of 'commercializing' funding. We knew from speaking to our banking clients that SMEs had a lot of difficulty borrowing money from the bank. We also knew that many people had idle cash in the bank earning close to zero interest rates. Based on this insight, we came up with the concept of a peer to peer lending community where SMEs can lend money from anyone. Above are some screenshots from our app.
As this was my first hackathon, I was slightly daunted about going up against the other teams and designing an app in a short span of time. There were teams from companies with over 12,000 employees worldwide!
But my fears were quickly assayed once we split up the work and got into the groove of things. Our team split into two. Half of us worked on the concept, wireframing and design while the other tackled the API and coding.
Part of our strategy was to win the judges hearts by incorporating the most Mastercard APIs. We designed our app to use 7, which on hindsight was probably overkill :). Integrating all of them was no mean feat. Thanks to help from the friendly Mastercard developers, we managed to figure everything out after many hours of tinkering.
In the end, we were happy to have came in second place! We also found some time to play foosball. Eugene and I kicked Jaclyn, Victor and Justin's butts. We had a go at the instant print camera booth. All in all, we had an amazing time working together as a team. Can't wait to attend the next hackathon!