Winners of the TiE SV Smart Cities Hackathon "Tackling the World’s Urban Social Issues"

TiE Silicon Valley SmartCities Hackathon, powered by Atomiton, enables coders, non-profits and social activists to produce solutions to improve cities across the globe. This year's winning teams have produced technology for some of our most pressing waste management issues, especially for developing countries.

TiE Silicon Valley is proud to announce the winners of the 2016 Smart Cities Hackathon initiative featuring the theme "Tackling the World’s Urban Social Issues". The event featured more than 100 teams who used their coding skills to produce innovative solutions for some of the most pressing environmental problems in the world. Three teams pulled ahead of the rest this year, with Team Culminant walking away with first prize.

Cleaning Up Our World Through Code

Through entrepreneurship and stellar leadership, this year’s technological solutions are on track to put a major dent in the waste that threatens our global environment. The hackathon featured highly talented teams from over 10 countries and 50 cities coming together to brainstorm, code and create in the name of a greater social cause.

Six outstanding projects were shortlisted for more detailed judging — and they did not disappoint. Three key problems were available for teams to address, including parking, waste and water management. However, the three top teams chose to specifically address the waste management issue. After all, the challenge for waste management is huge, with the World Bank estimating that global solid waste is set to increase by 70 percent by 2025, which will generate six million tons of waste per day. This problem will require huge sums of money to manage, which are expected to exceed $375 billion annually by 2025, with developing nations baring the brunt of these costs.

In order to find solutions for the future, the first place Team Culminant produced a brilliant worker routing system. This Internet-of-Things (IoT) solution offers real-time tracking of all the top sites where garbage is accumulating and other waste management trends, and then efficiently reroutes workers according to this data. Their intuitive UI dashboard even helps tracks company balances and revenue to help waste managers as they build a smart and efficient marketplace for waste management. Their solution earned them a $5,000 prize and passes to TiEcon 2016, world’s leading annual conference on entrepreneurship.

A $3,000 second prize plus TiEcon passes went to Team Vermigold, which offered a self-learning waste management collection system that not only maximizes garbage collection in the minimum amount of time, but also grows revenue for waste management companies.

Team Vishwakarma snatched the third place prize of $2,000 plus TiEcon passes by devising a cost-effective trash bin system that uses odor sensors to improve metrics such as trash bin usage, dump sites and company revenue.

The event was made a reality through the tireless support and resources of our partners including BayBrazil, the City of Palo Alto, Outsource Brazil, and the academia.

Outstanding Submissions From Finalists

Vipin Jain, Chair of TiE Smart Cities, stated that, “It was very satisfying to see the quality of work produced by the finalists. They approached the problem differently making various observations about the environment, available resources, costs and resident behavior. Team Culminant stood out in terms of their approach to problem-solving, attention to detail, design, implementation and visualization, all leading to an optimized solution that delivered an impressive business and functional outcome. TiE congratulates all of the winning teams for a job well done.”

Submissions were evaluated based on key criteria, including meeting the business goals, functionality, usability, originality and articulation.