The one and only Laur Neagu! 🙂
We can’t wait to meet him tomorrow. When we hand him the well-deserved $2000 prize and we find out more about him. We’ll tell you everything about the winning app too. So stick around for updates. 🙂
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl6yi812WR4[/youtube]
Once again, thank you to all Spring Race III participants. For us, it’s been quite an experience. We hope it’s been the same for you too. 🙂
The surge of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has left some providers worried. After all, with the rise of SaaS, clients may be able to buy solutions directly from software vendors, skipping these providers altogether. But does this mean that in less than 5 years, service providers will lose most of their territory to vendors selling directly to the SMBs?
Consequently, a number of ITSPs and managed service providers are eying various services they can combine in a logical offer, so that their customers get hooked on the service, rather than on the individual products. A recent study showed that 68% of communications providers intend to offer SaaS within the next two years. One of the most promising services to incorporate is Unified Communications.
Research by MarketstoMarkets indicates the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market will grow to $23.34 billion by 2019 from the $13.10 billion it’s supposed to bring in this year. The reason is straightforward: many service providers are adding it to their portfolios, to complement their existing proposition made to the SMB customer.
We’re back with news! OK, partial news, but it’s just a matter of days until we all find out the winner of the last hackathon in the series, Spring Race III.
We just wanted to let you know that all the apps you have proposed as a solution to our challenge have been received. As it turned out, the $2000 prize was quite a motivator. 😉
A big THANK YOU to all those who worked hard and strove to design an app that handles picture management according to our requirements
Ready for the last hackathon? We surely hope so. Because this time we have a US $2000 prize that we can’t wait to award! 🙂 That is if you can design a solution that will automatically classify pictures as required below and submit it by next Friday, May 23rd, 24:00.
Before detailing the problem, here’s a short recap for those who are new at this: make sure you read the terms and conditions and follow the steps needed to enter the race. Don’t forget to register your team first using this form.
Managing pictures is a nightmare. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to locate a particular picture in a very large collection. But this is where you could lend a hand. We need you to dramatically simplify the process by building an automatic classification system. The system should be able to read a collection of pictures and classify them, based on the picture information (Exif and the actual picture content).
We’ve evaluated all the apps submitted in the Spring Race II hackathon, but unfortunately none of them solves the problem we proposed. You were supposed to create an app that could identify and score LinkedIn profiles, based on a particular set of provided info. The more the details, the better the match.
Since none of the apps we have received meets the requirements
For the past couple of weeks, we have been rolling out our new logo and brand visuals. Let’s face it, everybody needs to update their online presence once in a while, but changing the logo and brand visuals is a different story.
We liked our old logo because it was ours, but we were aware that it was not telling much about us. That’s why we decided to change it, for the first time in history. Many people in our team were highly attached to the old logo, so this proved to be a difficult process. We held internal brainstorming sessions, brand key workshops, and we tried using specialists outside the company.
In the end, we created the new logo internally, using an iterative process. This worked better than using external talent because no one was able to understand better than us the mechanisms that made us build our products this way, or fully grasp the emotions that change 4PSA every day.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/mQBfDhOZZe4[/youtube]
It’s all about the people and the story behind them.
Today we have a guest post written by the first winners of the Spring Races online hackathons. Enjoy!
Hi. We are Adriana and Paul, the team that won 4PSA’s first Spring Race.
Cloud for a better life, the motto said. We haven’t clouded so much, but we did try to improve someone’s life. We started by thinking about the spring of all bright ideas – education (high-school, in particular).
Our application, EduSoft, is designed to bring the 21st century into our country’s education management. The software offers its target users (students and teachers) a collection of integrated apps designed to fulfill specific needs. These functionalities are incrementally described below.
Time for Spring Race II, a new chance to win another US $1000 prize!
The same terms and conditions apply, so we’ll spare you the how-to-enter-the-race details. What’s even more important than meeting the May 12th, 24:00 deadline is that you submit an original solution, designed and implemented for this competition. This is a mandatory condition to enter the race, so please keep it in mind. And of course, register your team first using this form.
LinkedIn is used by millions of professionals in order to find potential business partners, new customers or talents for recruiting. While technically it is easy to search LinkedIn, even humans have trouble identifying the profiles that better match a set of criteria. For example, people with the longest LinkedIn profiles are not necessarily the best matches.
You must create an app that is able to identify and assign a score to the LinkedIn profiles based on input information. This input must be provided by the user, therefore the app must ask as many details as possible about the desired profile in order to find the best match. The app must mine LinkedIn and present a list of potential candidates ordered by a match score.
The winners of Spring Race I
Spring Race I reached its finish line on April 30 at midnight. We want to congratulate all the competitors and to invite them to join Spring Race II next week.
There have been a lot of teams that registered, but unfortunately not all of them submitted a solution. While this is normal in a race, even if there is only one winner, we want everyone to reach the finishing line 🙂 So, please go ahead and let us know in a comment to this article your thoughts on the chosen subject, how well it was described, and the difficulty level. Your feedback will be considered for the next race.