A total of 50 teams will be admitted to the final, with 5 teams assigned to each of the 10 tasks. The tasks are all related to the digitalisation of the tourism industry and have been chosen by the hackathon's partners From January 28 to 31, the partners will review all applications and select the best applicants based on their team portfolio and the description of their solution.
Teams must be comprised of three to five people, made up of front-end, back-end and mobile developers, programmers, data science specialists and designers. Independent participants will be placed on a team. In addition, companies with finished projects in the target areas can demonstrate their solutions and present them separately at the hackathon. However, they will not be considered competition participants and are not eligible for the prize.
Companies who contributed tasks for the Moscow Travel Hack include Facebook, MegaFon Travel, the Federation Tower observation deck Panorama 360, Aeroexpress, the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve, the tourism portal Discover.Moscow, the City of Discoveries project, the Russpass platform and the MTS Startup Hub in cooperation with the website Ponominalu.ru.
The teams participating in the Russpass task will have access to cloud services and virtual machines for data handling from Amazon Web Services and the winner will be given access to the company's services. Moreover, the IZI Travel mobile guide platform will provide its API content and audio guide usage statistics.
The final of the hackathon will be held on February 8th and 9th at the Congress Centre Technopolis Moscow. The last day of the event will feature pitches by the finalists and speeches from major business leaders, including:
● Andrey Sebrant, marketing director of Yandex;
● Evgeny Lisovsky, head of the travel maps service MAPS.ME (Mail.Ru Group);
● Maks Kraynov, managing director of the tourism service Aviasales, who, in collaboration with PhoCusWright, will present the first global study of the online tourism market in Russia and the CIS These speakers, both reputable industry researchers and representatives from the third biggest metasearch engine in the world, will provide a comprehensive understanding of the key trends in the industry and its development prospects for the upcoming years.
For reference:
A hackathon is a competition where teams of developers must find the optimal
solution for a task within a limited period of time. Usually, participants
create a prototype for an IT product (mobile applications, websites, bots).
Companies around the world have increasingly turned to hackathons as a way
of discovering new ideas and
opportunities for the development of certain areas of business.