AAA Hack Day winners named at Oklahoma State University

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

FLARE, an app focused on the best way to prevent and/or respond to an emergency while traveling, was the $3,000 top prize winner at AAA Hack Day, a first-time mobile application development contest hosted by the Oklahoma State University App Center, AAA Oklahoma and AAA Club Partners (ACP).

The 24-hour AAA Hack Day on Feb. 21-22 invited OSU students and employees to showcase their creativity and generate ideas based on the theme “Spring Break”. The OrangeTechnicals team of Thomas Evans, Aaron Shepard, James Jarret and Matthew Cohlmia captured first place and the opportunity for further development. The team’s FLARE app stores up to five contacts that can be notified in an instant with a call or message if any auto, medical, legal or personal emergency arises.

The second place prize of $1,500 went to The N’s team of Victor Hugo Ramirez Espinoza, Ivan Preito Y Abrego, Marcela Castillo and Sergio Perez for their app, Bunch Up. The Dream Team of Swapneel Deshpande, Lukasz Witek and Jimmy Walker were third and won $500 for their app, AAA Host.

“An app contest like the AAA hack Day requires creativity, hard work and stamina – not to mention plenty of caffeine,” said Neal Krueger, President and CEO of AAA Oklahoma. “Working under pressure and time constraints, the teams created some very good app ideas related to spring break. Their wireframes demonstrated how the apps would look and function. Overall, I was very impressed with the quality of the work and the presentations.”

The winners were chosen from among 11 submissions by a panel of judges representing both experts in the field and AAA.  Judges included Dr. Blayne Mayfield of Oklahoma State University, Kayvon Olomi of Whiteboard, Neal Krueger of AAA Oklahoma and Michael Crane of ACP.