SmartFile Announces Winners of 2013 SmartFile Platform Bake-Off
After 50 development days and a 24-hour “Bake-Off-A-Thon,” SmartFile’s $17,000 open source programming competition for Indiana college students concluded with a judging and awards ceremony
SmartFile, a leader in business file sharing and FTP hosting, announces the winners of the ‘2013 SmartFile Platform Bake-Off’.’ The grand prize winner was Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) students Ani Chan and Manpreet Singh from "Team Octodog." The team received $10,000 from SmartFile for their application “SmartClip,” a Google Chrome extension that clips sections of websites and saves them for future viewing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so simultaneously shocked and happy in my life,” said Chan. “Aside from being able to hold one of those ridiculously huge checks like a lottery winner, the best part of the competition was the validation that comes from building something from start to finish. Sometimes as a college student, it’s easy for your projects to go unnoticed, so it’s nice to receive feedback and interest from likeminded people and successful business leaders.”
Indiana college students were challenged to develop an open source application that interacts with the newly released SmartFile API over a period of 50 days. To help teams finish development, SmartFile hosted a 24-hour “Bake-Off-A-Thon” a week prior to submission to help finalize development. Registered students accepted the challenge to showcase their talents, but only nine qualified for the finals. Five of Indianapolis’ top business thinkers listened to five-minute pitches from the finalists before then scoring each “app” electronically in the following five categories: Innovation, Utility, Use of SmartFile Platform, Design and User Experience.
The top four teams re-pitched their applications to the Bake-Off party audience who then voted electronically before “Team Octodog” was crowned champion. Purdue University students, Eric Lovelace and Levi Miller, from team "Winnovation” were awarded second place and received $5,000 for their mobile-app “SmartBox.” Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology students, Erik Sanders and AJ Piergiovanni, from team "Dangling Pointers” were awarded third place and received $2,000 for their web-app “ReciCopy.”
John Hurley, SmartFile’s President and Co-Founder, said the judges were impressed with the caliber of work, which made choosing the winners difficult. “But Team Octodog amazed everyone with an impressive and functional application with the right combination of entrepreneurial spark, innovation, real-world viability and skillful development.”
SmartFile’s Bake-Off was not only created to inspire and facilitate engagement between this next generation of programmers, but also to help develop the ecosystem for SmartFile’s new “platform” initiative. During the ceremony, Hurley announced that “the online file platform” from SmartFile would now be FREE for developers who sign up for a beta account. Offering unlimited transfer and 100GB of storage space allows SmartFile to cater to the underserved development community. An official announcement for the online file platform initiative will be made in the coming week.
For more information about the ‘2013 SmartFile Platform Bake-Off’, please visit www.smartfile.com/bakeoff/. More details about SmartFile’s development can be found at www.smartfile.com/developers/.
PRESS CONTACT
Patrick Tarpey
Communications Coordinator @SmartFile
877-336-3453, ext. 730
About SmartFile
SmartFile is a business file sharing & FTP hosting platform built on an open source API. From Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, SmartFile is the trusted solution chosen to store, transfer, and share files securely online. Multi-user access, unlimited file size, user permissions, company branding, customized links, unlimited connections and transfers are select features often utilized by SmartFile customers to move big data in one secure environment. For more information, call 877-336-3453 or visit www.smartfile.com.
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