Whether you’re a coding newbie hoping to pick up some knowledge, or a seasoned professional looking to show off your skills, there’s no better place than a hackathon to unite over a shared love of what’s hot now in tech. In case you didn’t know, a “hackathon” is an event where participants of varying skill levels and tech specialties gather to generate ideas and create a viable product. Typically, hackathon participants work in close contact, often camping together at their desks until the project is finished. That simply isn’t possible in a global pandemic, but it didn’t stop RingCentral Xiamen from hosting the most well-attended in central China, with 50 teams participating virtually.
This year’s competition focused on four key areas: Drive Efficiency, Better Collaboration, Improve User Experience and a Challenger’s League for participants from non-technical departments. The talent and innovation on display was so far off the charts, there were actually two winners in the Improve User Experience category —the judges simply couldn’t choose a favorite.
And the winners are…
Drive Efficiency: Wayne Zhou & Thomas Yang – “Meeting Shuriken”
Shows the status of attendees before they join a meeting and reminds invitees who haven’t joined in one step. Allows quick replies for upcoming meetings.
Better Collaboration: Troy Huang & Jayson Zhang – “Screen Sharing Like A Thunderbolt”
Introduces the “Drag & Share” pattern in Video and Phone features, making screen sharing in a RingCentral Video meeting extremely fast and easy. Brings media streaming features into RingCentral Video and delivers much higher video and audio file sharing quality.
Improve User Experience (1): Ping Wei & Mario Lin – “Post-It’s”
Adds a tag and saves current relative position by long-tapping the scroll bar on conversation screens, so users can easily navigate back to the saved position by tapping the tag. Allows users to add up to 3 tags for a conversation, locally stored.
Improve User Experience (2): Paul Lai & Zoey Weng – “Reminder”
Provides users a way to quickly add reminders, anytime and anywhere. Users can also use Reminder to manage their to-do lists.
Challenger’s League: Sven Liu & Sam Patterson – “Single-Step Attendance”
Helps hosts add participants to meetings effortlessly. Hosts can quickly see invitees who have not yet joined, and then take action that will help absent invitee(s) join incoming video calls.
The winning projects were all demonstrated for US executives on November 11. They are currently being spec’d with Product Marketing and teams are gathering to plan for their future release.
Prizes for top three finishers included:
- 1st prize: Nintendo Switch/DJI Mavic Mini
- 2nd prize: XGIMI Play Projector/Apple Watch 3
- 3rd prize: Kindle Paperwhite/Ergotron monitor stand
Hackathons are tremendous opportunities for growth, as well as great opportunities for participants to network, learn and grow. Networking may be harder at this year’s hackathon, but the opportunities for growth and development were as strong as ever. We can’t wait to see these new products in production – and the innovations these talented teams will come up with next year. #workingtogether
Originally published Dec 02, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
