Recently we had our very own hackathon at the Yodlee® office in Bangalore, India. Our engineers and developers were all encouraged to think creatively during this three day special occasion designed with innovation in mind. We turned loose 19 teams of very bright people with two simple directions. One ...have fun! And two...no rules, just the tools! Armed with only some great tools, which include our next generation APIs for aggregation and documentation, the adventure began. When we threw the rulebook out the window, we encouraged creativity and innovation at Yodlee. Creating Innovation from Within As a long-time attendee, hacker, and organizer of hackathons—I wanted the Yodlee Interactive Hackathon event to highlight our engineers’ genius. At the hackathon, several teams brainstormed brave new ideas while testing our next generation APIs. Our engineers were the first to receive exclusive access to innovate with these APIs. As mobile apps as well as web apps continue to evolve, the transformation at Yodlee is about generating new data sets and empowering visionary entrepreneurs and developers to build disruptive financial solutions with our APIs. Although success is it's own reward, the participants were also offered cash prizes. It was an adventure in technology, to say the least. There was plenty of cross-team interaction and the emphasis never shifted from "best practice" considerations. Our engineers and developers set out to build the "best", "most innovative" new fintech solutions utilizing our next generation Aggregation APIs. Trust me...it worked. We were able to obtain some amazing results. And the Winners of our Yodlee Interactive Hackathon are…. Champion Team: Codeprenuers [Sumit Raj] Codepreneurs: A financial search app similar to Google search where you type in something and get the results. This app allows for flexible and user-friendly choices. For example, a user can choose between a transaction finapp in the dashboard or an expense analysis finapp. 1st Runner Up Team: Team 1 [Rahul Raina] Graph Search for Yodlee: It uses natural language queries (NLP), to get all kinds of mashed up data based on user query. An example would be: What transactions were done in January at McDonald's? 2nd Runner Up Team: Hybrid Lab Nerds [Ashwin Lobo, Joseph Khan] Componentizing Yodlee’s next generation APIs: With Yodlee APIs, a developer still needs to write imperative logic and boilerplate code to access real data. With the interactive elements, a developer does not need to worry about the underlying API. The developer just needs to use our elements to create apps in record time. This leverages the Yodlee Platform through our next generation APIs. Shout Outs to Some Other Amazing Teams Team: Selfie Pasanga [Selvarah Rengaraj, Vetrivelkumar Pandi] Selfie: A mobile app that defines the way we do Personal Financial Management by calling our next generation APIs based on image recognition and dynamically categorizes and displays financial data. Team: Fin Moblify [Shah Nishant Kumar Jain, Khasim Basha Thogaruchiti, Prachi Verma] Fin Trends: With features like an account aggregator and a transaction feed, this is another amazing app. It asks the user how much to invest or spend. There are added features showing which investment option is trending among your friends. Kudos to everyone that participated in the hackathon! We appreciate the out-of-the box thinking and the great effort. Remember that your choice of an API matters. Yodlee Interactive has enabled over 350+ internet innovators to build powerful fintech solutions in the market. From early-stage startups to technology enterprises, we are dedicated to bringing that magic to our developer community. Contact us to learn more!
