TADHack’s recent return to Kuala Lumpur brought 150 participants full of energy and ideas on how programmable telecoms and connectivity services of voice, video and messaging over the internet can be used to enable new business ideas.

Participants were given 48 hours to work with sponsor APIs to ideate and build working prototypes of their solution which could be a business idea and/or a social idea. 

Teams that were shortlisted as finalists pitched solutions that mashed together a range of technologies together across Connectivity, IoT, AI and Big Data. 

Some examples of ideas from these finalists included:

1. The use of social media to identify prospective customers and to engage them via a chatbot to explore and encourage purchasing behaviour

2. The use of sensors & IoT platforms to protect elderly people from falling down and to send an automated SMS to family members if an accident happens

3. The use of videoconferencing in new and interesting ways for reaching doctors, tutoring students and providing automated transcripts.

For the first time, Digi released a set of APIs focusing on Identity, Messaging & Payment, which the teams could use. The Digi APIs are unique to TADHack Malaysia and not part of the global APIs shared with other participants. In particular, Digi’s Identity and Payment APIs were received very well by the teams, and integrated into many of their solutions during the hackathon. 

Based on this interest, Digi is now actively exploring the possibility of releasing these and other APIs to the broader public for developers, start-ups and the broader entrepreneur community to utilize these services to build, test and scale their ideas.

Apart from sharing the Identity, Messaging and Payment APIs, Digi also supported the event by hosting it and mentoring teams throughout the duration of the hackathon. Held in parallel across 30 cities around the world, approximately 70% of TADHack Global, Kuala Lumpur participants came from universities this year.

Participants competed in three prize categories: Local TADHack, Digi and MDEC. Apart from MDEC’s sponsorship of three prizes in the IoT/Big Data category, they are now seeking to put 2 of the winning ideas in their Big App challenge.

"Consumers want better ways to engage with the providers of their everyday products and services, most industries across the world are struggling to meet consumer demand in this respect. TADHack embraces and promotes a "programmable" and "embeddable" model for telecoms services that help address this demand. The sponsors and innovators that are involved in TADHack are taking telecoms to new and exciting places, through this, telecoms is breaking out of its traditional confines and creating new and interesting opportunities across many industries." said Craig Richards, representing TADHack.

For Digi, TADHack KL represents an opportunity to engage with forward leaning innovation within the telecom developer ecosystem in Malaysia and accelerate the development of ideas and talent in line with their ambition to become Malaysians’ favourite digital service provider by 2020.

“Most Hackathons have a tendency to focus on the application/OTT layer - however there is a lot of opportunity to innovate in core connectivity services as well. TADHack, as one of the largest global telecom focused hackathons represents a great opportunity for Digi to see what kind of ideas the developer community generates with the APIs that we are releasing. It also gives us a platform to engage with and develop digital talent in Malaysia”, said Animesh Mukherjee, Head of the HR Centre of Expertise for Digi.

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