Pinoys shine at AirAsia's first hackathon

AirAsia's recently-concluded Airvolution 2017, the company's first-ever hackathon, gathered more than 100 individuals for over 18 grueling hours of non-stop coding. The event took place at AirAsia’s RedQ headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on the weekend of March 18 and 19.

“We see Airvolution as the first step in AirAsia’s evolution into a business that supports the tech community, not just in terms of giving them a platform to explore new ideas but also to express their dreams through funding and guidance,” AirAsia stated.

Airvolution 2017 tasked contenders with creating innovative tools and applications to address a specific challenge, which AirAsia presented in the following question:

“How do you profile AirAsia fans based on their digital social footprints to improve customer experience?”

The 20 teams were comprised of 13 nationalities from the following 10 countries: Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and of course, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Team Swoosh Swoosh was one of the two Philippine teams.

Airvolution 2017 was not Team Swoosh Swoosh’s first hackathon.

“It’s more like our 20th?” they joked. “But it’s our first time, as a group, outside (the Philippines)... This is a fresh experience for all of us.”

They prepared for the event by having lots of brainstorming sessions.

“Each of us has something unique to say,” they explained, adding that they looked at the different current issues that they could have the opportunity to improve. They also developed something “high-level” for the competition.

Despite their experiences with past hackathons, they still had the jitters at Airvolution 2017 – especially because this was their biggest hackathon, ever.

“We still get that feeling in our stomach, especially when we do something fresh,” they confessed. 

The hackathon proper started at 2:30pm on Saturday and ended at 9:00am the next day. Beginning at 9:15am, each team was then given 8 minutes to present their prototypes before a panel of judges.

Several teams made apps capable of examining social media to determine a customer’s characteristics for the purposes of personalizing their experience.

For example, India’s A-team can gleam insights about your personality by extracting data – such as your interests, travel details, etc. – from your Twitter account. Based on said data, the app then suggests destinations that you might enjoy. The app also takes your budget into account.

A Sri Lankan team’s app uses collated social media data to find you a seatmate you have shared interests with – thus giving you someone you can to talk with during the flight.

Another team created a chat bot that can assist you in securing a seat in the aircraft, as well as finding s seatmate you’d get along with.

The second Philippine team, Team Algorithm, also created an app that taps social media to help fliers find “travel buddies” they can spend time with on the plane. The matching process is consensual – if one customer is uncomfortable with their match, they can decline to be seated next to them. The app also generates flight destinations tailored to the customer's interests.

Team Swoosh Swoosh went a different route and developed an app called Crawl, which allows social media managers to easily find customer complaints – about issues such as flight delays, customer service, refunds, etc. – in the comments section of AirAsia’s social media sites. By cutting down on social media noise, AirAsia can identify and respond quickly to problems, thereby improving customer experience.

However, despite the Philippine teams' excellent showing, the hackathon ended with Team Aviato – composed of Choo Yan Sheng, John Goh Choo Ern, Durwin Ho Hsu Tian, Albert Puah Beng Hong and Kevin Kwa Leung Boon – crowned the winner. 

The Singaporean team’s app analyzes Instagram pictures and likes to build a real-time user profile. This in turn allows the app to suggest AirAsia destinations and food highly geared towards the customer’s specific interests.

As the winning team, Aviato recieved RM25,000, 100,000 AirAsia Big Points, and 5 return flights to any AirAsia destination.

“We were really impressed by the creative problem-solving and technical knowledge on display this weekend,” said AirAsia Chief Data and Digital Officer Nikunj Shanti. “The teams demonstrated some truly out-of-the-box thinking and we look forward to seeing more innovative ideas on how to make travel even better for our guests.”

AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes believes the Airvolution 2017 hackathon will play a significant role in the company’s first steps towards a future as a fully digital airline.

“We want to get ideas... from the people that know us, from the people that we fly to help us build this new digital airline. And what better way than to start off with the first hackathon? This will be step one of engaging the young, and old, and middle-aged entrepreneurial and digital economy in Asia. Step two will be to launch an AirAsia lab to create an incubator to fund some of you (the hackathon contenders) to build new businesses and new careers.”

He expounded on the important role of the hackathon participants:

“Can you get so many different ideas in one company and move quickly? This (hackathon) was my way of fast-tracking, to get intellectual property into the company and build relationships. I don't think, even if I had 50 people, I would get the creativity and talent that we’re going to see today from the hundred participants.” — TJD, GMA News