27 participants, 10 hours, 1 winning team and an endless amount of innovation. Naviga held our first internal hackathon last month from October 21st-22nd to promote innovation within the company in a fun, competitive way.
Content Lab team listening to Raul’s Kick – Off session
If you haven’t attended a hackathon before, it’s a sprint-like event where challengers come with ideas and collaborate on software projects in a set amount of time. The core theme for our first annual Naviga Hackathon was Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Day 1
For the first day of the event, we were grateful to have John Shaw, one of our partners at Amazon, spend some time with us and lead a discussion on “Innovation: AI and MLS.” In his lecture, John talked about innovation in the field of AWS AI & MLS. He provided us with clear context around AWS AI & MLS capabilities and some business cases.
Day 2
For the second day of the event, we saw 27 participants in 8 teams from our Content Lab (mainly Sweden) and Zinio (Spain) compete in our inaugural hackathon event. Each team got to work with cutting edge technology in Amazon AI/MLS while being judged by many top-level executives.
While the theme of the Hackathon was AI and MLS, the goal was for each participant to have fun and get acquainted with ML through an exercise which provides real solutions to business problems. The 27 participants were encouraged to look into the future and think about what can help our customers and give them value. At the end of the 10-hour event, the judges wanted to focus on comprehension of the AI/MLS technology, personalization of a final product, and recognition of some fantastic work.
The hackathon was a great success with the team “Project Dictaphone” ultimately winning the competition. Shoutout Martin Almqvist, Johan Flisberg, and Björn Brändewall for their amazing work!
Recap
When the Naviga Hackathon idea started circulating, we had a goal in mind to spark innovation with cutting technology through a fun, competitive, challenge with our employees. At the end of it all, we can confidently say this goal was achieved with the genius of our amazing employees. In our industry, where there is constant pressure to continue to innovate and improve, the hackathon proved to be a fun, successful way to bring new ideas to the table so that we can continue to grow with our customers and take both of our businesses to the next level.
We are extremely grateful for our external partners Amazon and Vista for their support and guidance throughout the event. Additional thanks go out to our Hackathon ambassadors (Jarek Gabara and Danne Lundquist), as well as Leo Brunnick and Raul Suarez for their contributions in setting up the event. And last, but certainly not least, a special thank you to everyone who participated in the Naviga Hackathon event because this event would not be possible without you!