Keep Your Fingers Ready: Virtusa’s New Hackathon is Here

As we often say here, Sri Lanka’s been at the receiving end of a series of hackathons lately. Barely a month goes by without a new hackathon breaking the silence. Initial hackathons were held mostly by developer communities: now we’re seeing a shift towards industry giants actively lending a hand and rolling their own shows. Both have had successes – if you remember, Takas.lk, the noted eCommerce site, emerged from a hackathon. There have been others.

Now, meet the latest of this new breed of hackathons: VirtusaX 2014, by Virtusa in collaboration with Slasscom. This 24-hour mobility hackathon will take place on the 12th of September at Virtusa premises, and in true hackathon form, will be a 24-hour non-stop coding haul that sees teams of contestants burning through ideas, code and coffee to come up with the next groundbreaking mobile app. It’s picking up quite a bit of traction among the coder communities.

The benefits include the possibility of seed funding, perhaps even meeting future team members and rubbing shoulder with industry experts to see what exactly the world needs right now.

“Innovation is at the heart of what we do at Virtusa,” said Madu Ratnayake, Senior VP and General Manager of Virtusa. “We work with a large number of leading global businesses day in day out to create technology driven innovations to create better services to their customers. We have been running very successful hackathons for many years within the company to accelerate opportunities in Mobile, Cloud, Bigdata and Social  for our clients.

This year with VirtusaX, we are extending that same platform to anyone in the industry to create an open innovation platform. Teams from within and outside Virtusa can come together in a very exciting environment to give life to leading next generation ideas.  We have kept all possibilities open, and with some of the very smart people who have already signed up, I’m sure we will see some exciting ideas and collaborations.”