A hackathon organized by SCU's OMIS Student Network
The winning team!
With more than double the number of participants of BroncoHack 2015, BroncoHack 2016 was certainly a success. Kicking off the 24-hour hackathon in Lucas Hall was Tim Tully, the VP of Engineering for Yahoo! As the keynote speaker, Tully gave an energetic pep talk to all the participants; he talked about the various hackathons he had participated in and offered a few very important tips about the hackathon environment. Once properly food-fueled and pumped by Tully’s talk, the teams broke out and claimed their territories for the next 24 hours.
Many teams used the Lucas Hall breakout rooms (all of which were reserved for BroncoHack), while others chose to take advantage of the unique classroom set up. Each team was given freedom in how to set up their environment, and many brought extra monitors and sleeping pads. NBC reporter Garvin Thomas came by at 5am to interview a few participants in their natural habitat for a segment about BroncoHack 2016 (airing on Thursday, April 21 at 5pm on NBC News Bay Area).
At 10am on Sunday, Professor Haibing Lu vetted each team's program to ensure it was feasibly created in 24 hours. At 12pm, the judging began. Each judge was well qualified and enthusiastic to be a part of BroncoHack 2016. Our judges included Frank Harder -- VP at Samsung Electronics in their Strategy and Innovation Center; Phil Mui -- Senior VP, Product Management, Salesforce.com; and John Danner -- co-founder and CEO of Zeal. Each of the 9 teams was given exactly 5 minutes to pitch its program to our judges.
Out of a field of phenomenal participants, the first place winners were Jullian Callin, Alicia Lent, Viet Huynh, Christian Rosa, Isaac Sornborger, and Andy Chung, whose team created a program called “eS eM eS.” Recognizing that many people have access to phones but some cannot afford a data or wifi plan, eS eM eS is a program that allows texters to query through the internet using SMS texting. For example, someone could text "wiki George Washington," and the program would text back the wiki article related to George Washington, cutting out wifi and data all together. The winning team’s program was technically innovative and also incorporated a feasible business model. After vigorous debate, the judges decided that eS eM eS best satisfied the hackathon’s criteria.
One of the organizers of BroncoHack 2016, Tiffany Ta is a sophomore at Santa Clara University; she plans to major in Management Information Systems, with an Entrepreneurship minor.