CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Quick Base, a leading application development platform that helps businesses achieve operational agility, today announced the winners of its first-ever Virtual Hackathon, which saw the creative potential of citizen development unleashed across more than 100 entries and 14 countries, with submissions addressing some of the most pressing challenges in the workplace, community and world at large. The Quick Base Virtual Hackathon demonstrates the power of democratizing technology and equipping people of all backgrounds and skill levels with development tools. Submissions were developed in just two months or less, addressing challenges in education, healthcare, enterprise automation, nonprofits and more.

Submission categories spanned connection, responsiveness, equity and security, with the top winners including:

• First place ($35,000) – RKM MediaLab with WeMindYou App: Covid-19 lockdowns in India have taken a significant emotional toll on the more than 40 million children who come from poor, rural families. To address this need, RKM MediaLab collaborated with Ramakrishna Math to create a pilot program to gauge the emotional wellbeing of underprivileged children. The application uses questionnaires and facial analysis to empower these children with body-mind training techniques such as meditation or yoga, and to send detailed reports and analysis on the children’s emotional states using facial recognition and EEG technology to help rural community coordinators effectively manage the program.
• Second place ($30,000) – Alliant Charters with Olympus: After the rapid switch to remote learning, many school administrators struggled with coordinating virtual lesson plans, grading, tracking student progress and parent-teacher relations. Google Classroom offers excellent tools for providing course materials and grading, for example, but lacks an avenue for sharing data with the schools and the students’ parents. The Olympus solution addresses these challenges by seamlessly connecting Google Classroom with Quick Base via Quick Base Pipelines integrations to pull relevant data for a real-time tracking of students’ progress, courses and district-wide attendance, as well as creating automations to help teachers prepare courses and engage students.
• Third place ($25,000) – Marguerite Keating with WasteWatcher: Inspired by her city’s goal to divert 40% of all city food and yard waste from landfills by 2027, Keating created a solution that uses customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to track all commercial food waste participants drop off locations, equipment and in-field activities required for waste pick ups, and intake and management of waste during the compost creation process.
• Partner ($12,000) – VARC Solutions with People 2 People Disaster Relief & Response: VARC Solutions, a Quick Base Service Provider, created a collection of five integrated Quick Base apps to support People 2 People, a nonprofit that provides assistance during disasters. The solution manages the collection of food and financial donations, as well as the distribution of meals and financial support to those hit the hardest.

“There’s a myth that low-code solutions only solve simple workflows and are replacements for spreadsheets and emails. I’ve heard people state that organizations should not use low-code to develop customer-facing experiences or applications where multiple integrations are needed, said Hackathon judge Isaac Sacolick, president of StarCIO. “These submissions bust these myths and show that organizations can use low-code in a wide range of use cases and integrations. Furthermore, these solutions demonstrate that developers, including coders, enjoy building low-code applications as there’s plenty of opportunities to innovate and showcase smart technology solutions.”

Quick Base Virtual Hackathon submissions were judged based on three criteria: originality of the idea, scope and impact, and implementation. Additional awards were issued for the best overall use of Quick Base features (Indoor Air Quality Monitoring), best use of APIs (Quick Formula), and best Microsoft integration (Pandemic/Catastrophe Sheltering). In addition to these winners, 17 finalists were selected with noteworthy applications designed to:

• Help users search for nearby vaccination centers
• Provide caregivers access to daily data regarding isolated seniors’ physical and cognitive well-being
• Help women enduring domestic abuse
• Support sales automation with integrated call, meeting, and email features
• Use artificial intelligence to help customer support teams triage incoming support tickets

“We have been impressed by the passion and creativity of the entrants, who built applications that are truly helping to make a difference in their companies, communities and the world,” said Deb Gildersleeve, chief information officer at Quick Base. “As we’ve seen in our recent research with Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, leading enterprise companies are relying more and more on rapid-cycle innovation and low-code platforms to give line of business users the tools they need to quickly adapt and create solutions to address the challenges they may face. The Hackathon winners are a testament to that worldview in the ingenious way they’ve leveraged the Quick Base platform to improve business processes and bring their big ideas to life.”

The panel of judges who reviewed the submissions was comprised of internal Quick Base judges, including CIO Deb Gildersleeve, CPTO Jay Jamison and product and customer managers; and two external judges, including Isaac Sacolick, a recognized social media CIO influencer, blogger and industry speaker; and Jason Bloomberg, a leading IT industry analyst, keynote speaker, and globally recognized expert on enterprise technology.

To learn more about Quick Base’s platform for citizen development and operational agility, visit QuickBase.com.

About Quick Base
Quick Base is a business application development platform that helps businesses achieve operational agility, freeing enterprises to flex and evolve by safely connecting people, information and ideas everywhere. Our platform allows organizations of all sizes to develop solutions that work the way their people do, safely moving beyond the confines of traditional software development. Quick Base helps more than 6,000 customers, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 50. Visit QuickBase.com to learn more.

Media Contact

Chris Shattuck, ARPR on behalf of Quick Base, 8553008209, chris@arpr.com

SOURCE Quick Base