Hike – India’s fastest growing and largest mobile apps, announced the launch of its offline hack fest – The HikeAthon. In the first ever 2 days offline event, Hike is inviting engineers and mobile developers to think innovatively and find solutions on how to make the So-Lo-Mo (social-local-mobile) revolution a reality, especially in context of messaging.
Hike Messenger will conduct the event in partnership with Venturesity, a peer learning and competition platform. Venturesity has been instrumental in conducting hackathons for several leading startups, ecommerce companies and even large enterprises.
The 24-hour HikeAthon, hosted in association with Venturesity, will begin on Saturday (28th March) morning and the winners will be announced on Sunday (29th March) evening. Three winning teams will get prizes of up to Rs 5,00,000 and shortlisted participants could be offered jobs at India’s fastest growing start-up. Amid increasing aspirations for working with startups among the youth of India, Hike has received over 1,000 registrations for the HikeAthon.
Rajat Bansal, CTO, Hike Messenger said, “At hike, we are on a mission to bring India online. We believe, we start actualizing that when we hit 100M users. We want to invite all smart developers, to build for India and help bring India online. With our first offline HikeAthon, we wanted to reach out to the breed of hardcore software developers who are equally passionate to develop apps and features which help elevate the end-user experience.”
He further added, “This industry is witnessing an exciting phase wherein a billion people are going to come on to the Internet, for the first time on a mobile device. That’s the audience we’re building for.”
The selected participants will be given a unique problem set related to So-Lo-Mo and they can choose to build their products in teams of two to four members. The event is free and open to all experienced and novice developers and will take place at Hike’s corporate office in Bangalore. Over 100 developers from across India are expected to be a part of HikeAthon this weekend.
