Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) recently sponsored AngelHack KL 2016, Malaysia’s tech ecosystem’s largest hackathon event. This year’s 24-hour hackathon, held on 4th and 5th June at Berjaya Times Square, witnessed 370 participants, a whopping 25 per cent increase from last year.
MDEC worked with iProperty to sponsor the release of 65 million rows of user behaviour data as well as property transacted pricing data which saw 20 data-driven applications being developed. As the lead agency responsible for driving Malaysia’s digital economy, MDEC is always on the lookout for opportunities to collaborate with government and private sectors to nurture, bring out and enhance the young Malaysian talent pool in the digital technology industry.
“We are proud to have sponsored AngelHack KL 2016 which has given our young local talents the opportunity to showcase their technical skills, capabilities and knowledge,” said Ir Dr Karl Ng, Head of Big Data Analytics Innovation, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). “We hope that initiatives such as this will help in growing and building the technology ecosystem.”
The innovation theme this year was Online to Offline (O2O) Commerce, Big Data Analytics and Smart Living. This year’s event was also the very first hackathon in Malaysia to be held in a shopping mall to allow public viewing. The public were given the opportunity to witness and experience first-hand how these coders and developers create and develop software technology.
“AngelHack KL 2016 was a tremendous success this year. Not only did we exceed our participation target, we were encouraged to see higher participation and participants from diverse backgrounds. This year’s hackathon marks a crucial milestone in our effort to build and grow Malaysia’s digital technology industry,” said Heislyc Loh, Ambassador, AngelHack Kuala Lumpur.
Four individuals from Asia Pacific University emerged as this year’s champion with their custom digital innovation application and website, ‘Kraud’. Kraud is a meetup planner for friends with group voting capabilities & discount offers. The team will be representing Malaysia at the AngelHack Annual Global Demo Day and have won themselves a three-month mentorship programme with a pool of local and global mentors from Silicon Valley, California, USA.
