PayPal's BattleHack to take place in Toronto on July 18-19

PayPal Canada is hosting this year's BattleHack in Toronto on July 18-19. The Task is to build a mobile app in 24-hours to better your city or community.

Coders in Tokyo, London, Berlin, Venice and Chicago have already battled it out. Soon, a few hundred Canadian developers will take up the challenge at PayPal’s BattleHack in Toronto on July 18-19th. Team Angry Kittens (last year’s Toronto winners) won a ticket to the World Finals where they placed second and nearly won the grand prize of $100,000 (US). 

 

PayPal awards first winners of Battle Hack in Toronto

The winning developer team of Maya Kenedy, Alex Christodoulou, Christopher Larsen, and Ernst Riemer from Pivotal Labs took home the coveted Viking axe trophies and a paid trip to the Battle Hack World Finals later this year.

PayPal just announced the winners of its inaugural Battle Hack competition in Toronto. Local developers were tasked to develop mobile apps that incorporate PayPal’s application programming interface or Braintree or Venmo Software Development Kits to solve community issues. Team Angry Kittens won the Toronto competition and has secured a spot at the PayPal Battle Hack World Finals in San Jose, California in November. They will compete with winners from 13 other cities including Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Miami, Mexico City, Moscow, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. The winner of that global competition will take home US$100,000 and be named the “Ultimate Hackers for Good.”

Team Angry Kittens created the Security Blanket mobile app with the use of Beacon, Bluetooth Low Energy technology, and Twilio to help parents track missing children. PayPal is used to have people donate to help locate the children or supply sensors to help find them. The team also hopes to use the app to monitor the whereabouts of Alzheimer’s patients and even pets.