For the last three years, Pinata has sponsored and judged the Hack Midwest Hackathon. Pinata is a midwest company, based out of Omaha, Nebraska, so computer programming and Kansas City are a perfect match for us. The hackathon always brings out some of the best creativity I see each year.

Hack Midwest, unlike many other hackathons, doesn’t have any specific theme or track. There are multiple prize tracks, but the big differentiator with Hack Midwest is that it combines corporate hackers with college hackers and awards prizes for each category in addition to sponsor prizes. Seeing kids and grown adults hacking alongside each other for 24 hours is a joy.

Let’s get into the prizes and winners.

Prizes

This year, Pinata offered up $10,000 in prizes across three categories. They were:

• Pinata Challenge - $5,000
• Pinata AI Challenge - $2,500
• Pinata Enterprise Challenge - $2,500

The Pinata Challenge was the prize for the best overall use of Pinata. The Pinata AI Challenge was the prize for the best use of Pinata alongside AI. And the Pinata Enterprise Challenge was the prize for the submission that most looked like it solved a real world problem and could be an actual application or business people used.

We had so many fantastic submissions that it was difficult to pick the winners. But pick we did. Let’s see what the winning teams built and why they won.

Pinata Challenge

Pinata is the Internet’s Files API. That means developers can easily add file uploads and retrieval to their apps. However, Pinata is so much more. This prize was all about using Pinata to its fullest.

The Pinata Palooza team took the challenge to heart and built an incredible file-driven digital version of the game Clue. Using Pinata’s API to upload, group, and retrieve files to power the entire game, the Pinata Palooza team impressed us with the breadth of their implementation.

Pinata AI Challenge

AI continues to be a dominant topic in tech, and we weren’t the only company sponsoring an AI-focused challenge at Hack Midwest. We were excited to see what participants would do when combining Pinata’s File API with AI, and the submissions did not disappoint.

Integrating Pinata for image storage was a huge time-saver. Pinning the images we needed to store was straightforward, and it eliminated the need to worry about the complexities of encoding and decoding typically required by traditional storage systems. Signing up for Pinata took longer than actually integrating it into the app (Not that the sign-up process is difficult)! The whole process was intuitive and simple.
- Joseph Seibel, Seekr team

The Seekr team built what we deemed the most entertaining app of the hackathon. They built a mobile scavenger hunt app that uses AI for two things:

1. It generates the items you need to find
2. It verifies the image you took on your phone matches the item you were supposed to find

Every image was stored on Pinata, and the Seekr team even created a global leaderboard for players. The images were fed into a model to verify the find, and players were awarded points for finding items.

Tons of fun!

HackMidwest was both an exhausting and rewarding experience. It’s always amazing to see how much you can achieve in just 24 hours when you’re focused and driven.
- Joseph Seibel, Seekr team

Pinata Enterprise Challenge

This challenge was the most open-ended, and most unique for us as a company. We’ve always had pretty clear prize tracks, but this year we wanted something that would push the boundaries a bit.

The Enterprise Challenge was designed to determine the app that most represented a real-world use case. The criteria for judging were loose, but generally we were looking for something that we could envision being a company in the future.

The Badger Vision team fit that bill perfectly. They built an app to help serve people with prosopagnosia (known as face blindness). The condition affects as much as 2.5% of the population, and there is no cure for it. Those with the condition cannot remember the faces of people they’ve met.

The Badger Vision team set out to help solve this by creating the software that would ultimately power future wearable technology. They demoed it using a phone while they wait for the rest of the world to catch up to them. The software will detect the face of a person in front of the user. If the face is known to the user, the software will play the person’s name. If it’s a new face, a chime will play so the user knows this is a new meeting.

We were blown away by this submission.

Conclusion

Pinata was born from a hackathon. We love hackathons. But more than anything else, we love seeing the creativity that come from constraint. Hack Midwest is the mother of all constraint, giving participants just 24 hours to create something meaningful. It was a blast, and we can’t wait to be back next year!

If you’re ready to hack on your own project, start using Pinata today.