After a resounding success last year, AngelHack KL 2016 lifted off in grandeur, as expected. This year the event witnessed 370 participants an increase vying for price money, glory and spots to head over to Silicon Valley. Held at Berjaya Times Square, the hackathon had Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) sponsoring the event together with Time and MOL.
The event also saw, MDEC together with iProperty the release of 65 million rows of user behaviour data as well as property transacted pricing data which saw 20 data-driven applications being developed.
“We are proud to have sponsored AngelHack KL 2016 which has given our young local talents the opportunity to showcase their technical skills, capabilities and knowledge,” said Ir Dr Karl Ng, Head of Big Data Analytics Innovation, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). “We hope that initiatives such as this will help in growing and building the technology ecosystem.”
The innovation theme this year was Online to Offline (O2O) Commerce, Big Data Analytics and Smart Living. For the first time the event was held at a shopping mall as commonly these type of competition are not mainstream and usually too nerdy for the common folks.Goes to show the traction the industry is gaining judging by the curious mall goers watching these coders and hackers go at!
“AngelHack KL 2016 was a tremendous success this year. Not only did we exceed our participation target, we were encouraged to see higher participation and participants from diverse backgrounds. This year’s hackathon marks a crucial milestone in our effort to build and grow Malaysia’s digital technology industry,” said Heislyc Loh, Ambassador, AngelHack Kuala Lumpur.
Four individuals from Asia Pacific University emerged as this year’s champion with their custom digital innovation application and website, ‘Kraud’. Kraud is a meetup planner for friends with group voting capabilities & discount offers. The team will be representing Malaysia at the AngelHack Annual Global Demo Day and have won themselves a three-month mentorship program with a pool of local and global mentors from Silicon Valley, California, USA.
