What happens when you ask developers to use their tech knowhow and brain power to solve some of the globe’s most pressing social problems?
You get a smart car that rolls down its windows if a baby is left in a hot car, an app that potential sexual assault victims can use to alert loved ones if they’re being threatened, and a device that helps reduce the digital divide in developing countries through a data-share system.
These were some of the hacks created at the world finals of the
2015 BattleHack Series, a 24-hour event held Nov. 14-15 at the PayPal headquarters in San Jose, California. It’s one of
several hackathons that PayPal and Braintree, a PayPal division, organize worldwide with a mission to harness the power of technology for social good.
“It’s different. It’s a new way to get big brains solving big problems,” says John Lunn, Senior Global Director, Braintree and PayPal Developer and Startup Relations. “It’s basically, ‘Make your city or your country or your community a better place.’”
Fourteen teams from cities including Venice, London, Chicago and Athens, were challenged with the event’s battle cry: “Are you the ultimate hacker for good?” They had to come up with new technologies that would make life better for people and communities using PayPal and Braintree products.
The winner of the $100,000 grand prize and the event’s iconic golden axe, Team Venice, created a hardware hack called ifCar that transforms any car into a smart car of sorts. The device helps drivers learn where and how to park in cities they visit; with additional sensors, it can also detect if a baby has been left in a car on a hot day and open the windows.
“We thought about the huge problem of children left inside cars,” says team member, Cristiano Griletti. With their hack, “we are rolling down the windows and we’re actually saving the baby.”
Team Melbourne looked at an issue troubling college campuses.
“One in four female college students will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate,” says team member, Christopher Michaelides. “Our goal was to stop situations from escalating to become more serious.”
The group’s solution uses a native app and a small hardware device that is inserted in the headphone jack of a phone to create an alarm of sorts. Once activated on a walk home, the student can press the pin when feeling threatened and get a fake phone call to potentially deter an attack.
If the situation escalates, the student can remove the pin to launch a conference call with her selected support network and simultaneously start recording video and audio with her phone. The feed is saved to the cloud, creating a record of the incident.
“We’ve empowered them to leverage their social network — a choice of friends and family — to act as their personal security shield,” Michaelides says.
Other teams took on tackling the digital divide. Team Singapore, which came in third place, worked on a solution to increase Internet access in the developing world. Their hack, called BitHive, is a kind of smart router that caches content users can access with the device. For example, if one user downloads a video to watch, that video can be cached for a second user to view later on — and now much faster since it’s not being downloaded over a slow data connection.
Those two viewers can then split the cost of the download, cutting down on the expense — a barrier to access. In the developing world, it costs about 10% of a person’s average income to get an Internet connection, while that number drops to about 1-2% in the developed world, says Arvin Sabu Joseph of Team Singapore.
“The Internet is one of the greatest assets today. Unfortunately, it’s still unaffordable in a lot of developing countries,” Joseph says. “Even though you pay more for an Internet connection in the developing world, your speed of access is slow. We wanted to bridge and open upthis barrier of affordability as well as speed.”
Other hacks at the event included a way to monitor Alzheimer’s patients while they’re home alone, a solution for teachers to keep track of children on field trips, and a smart city connect that adds functionality such as 911 support and EV charging to traditional street lamps.
The hacks are intended for real-world use and some have been implemented over the three years of the event. The Chicago team created an app two years ago that used a phone to discover how deep potholes were. It’s not an obvious nonprofit problem, but it’s an issue that affects people every day and they went on to implement their idea in the city.
The social innovation goals are similar with PayPal’s
Opportunity Hack, where computer engineers volunteer to work with local nonprofits over two days to help solve some of their most difficult tech problems. A team in San Jose in early November improved the search function and user interface for the
Alliance for CHANGEwebsite (
ReentryHousing.org), a resource for finding transitional housing for men and women who were recently incarcerated.
“Our team of volunteers brought us forward several steps,” says Peter Myers, Director of Development, Alliance for CHANGE. “Because our project has such a small budget, we rely on pro-bono tech work. With six people dedicating their time to us over two days, we were able to evolve our site in a very short time."
Prashanthi Ravanavarapu, PayPal Senior Manager of Cause Product Solutions, says the Opportunity Hack results “will genuinely help the nonprofits get closer to overcoming their challenges and better serve their communities.”
While the hackathons are fun events where developers can meet, collaborate and even form mentorships, competitors said they foster and facilitate the mission to use technology for social good.
Ravishankar Balasubramani of Team Chicago, which created a biometric scanner to prevent Alzheimer’s patients from wandering out of their homes, noted: “We wanted to use this amazing platform to do something about it.”
Emily Price is a freelance journalist who has covered consumer technology for over a decade. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Mashable and Popular Mechanics.