TROY – Abdul
Miah, co-founder and principal engineer at rankedHiRe, and Imran Raja, senior
software engineer at MB Financial, were awarded the $5,000 grand prize at
#hack4detroit, Automation Alley’s 24-hour hackathon to build an app using the
city of Detroit’s new Open Data Portal.
Automation
Alley, Michigan’s largest technology business association, held the event June
12-13 at Grand Circus Detroit.
The
hackathon challenged participants to build an application to navigate
family-friendly activities in the city of Detroit. The first place winners – Miah,
of Novi, and Raja, of Canton – built a mobile web app called Ride4Detroit that
helps people discover, create and share bike routes in the city. Using data
provided by the city of Detroit, the team integrated existing bike paths to
make users aware of and even report issues as they bike through Detroit.
“#hack4detroit
was a tremendous success thanks to the hard work of Automation Alley, Grand
Circus and all of our talented participants who spent 24 hours creating mobile
applications to benefit the citizens of Detroit. Automation Alley has and will
continue to be a supporter of Detroit’s rebirth,” said Ken Rogers, Automation
Alley executive director. “We continue to be extremely impressed with the
diversity and level of technical talent our region has to offer and that was on
full display at #hack4detroit.”
The apps
were judged by Beth Niblock, CIO of the City of Detroit; Sean Hurwitz, CEO of
Pixo; Brian Balasia, CEO of Digerati; and Will McDowell, Business Analyst at
Detroit Labs.
Event
sponsors included the City of Detroit, Comcast Business, Delphix, Digerati,
Detroit Labs, 5-hour Energy, Grand Circus Detroit, New Horizons Computer
Learning Centers and Socrata.
Second place
winners included PishPosh.TV founders Ben Duell Fraser and Michael Evans,
who is also a senior developer at Loveland Technologies. The third place winner
was Jonathan Werber, a developer at Nexient.
