News: Changing Office Life for the Better with the DB Best IoT Hackathon

On February 15-16, 2019, DB Best held our first IoT Hackathon. This internal event pitted our best developers against each other in the new DB Best office.

We provided all participating teams with an Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Gen) Alexa-enabled Bluetooth speaker. The goal of the hackathon was to create a functional service to improve office productivity using the Amazon smart speaker.

Our teams quickly huddled together and discussed their unique IoT solution. Each team focused on how best they could tackle the modern problems facing each workplace and quickly began to build their new service. When the final bell rang, and all teams had to lift their hands off the keyboard, they presented their solutions to the judges. The team mentors, who also were the jury of the hackathon, had a difficult choice ahead of them.

Meet the DB Best IoT Hackathon Winners

At the end of the day, the UI POWER team sealed the deal with the narrowest of margins. They developed an imaginative yet practical voice controlled meeting logger. Amazon Alexa now records all the meetings in our meeting rooms and then stores the recordings in the Amazon Cloud. Our teams now use simple voice commands to add the participants of the meeting, highlight the discussions of action items and key questions. At the end of the meeting, the meeting logger sends summary emails to all participants. Feedback from our employees, as well as guests who have taken meetings, have praised the innovative system and we are looking at expanding it to all of the DB Best offices around the world.

We congratulate the winning team for their unique approach to solving office problems in the first DB Best IoT hackathon. We also want to send a big thank you to all of our other teams for their passion, commitment, and willingness to change office life for the better by creating state-of-art IoT solutions.

DB Best has over 300 highly professional developers in various fields, from data management to mobile app development. The DB Best IoT hackathon brought together their awesome skills and united members of different DB Best teams. However, we plan to reach out to a wider audience in our upcoming hackathons. Next time, we will open the doors for all developers.