Inriver announces winner of the Innovation Labs 2021 Hackathon

As Tom Freston, one of the MTV founders, said, “Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” And there’s no better way to showcase innovation than with an inriver Partner-only Hackathon!

The inriver Innovation Labs Hackathon was a little different from the traditional approach. Instead of a crazy couple of days living on energy drinks and little sleep, the Hackathon went digital. The teams had three weeks to create their winning submission. So how much pizza and energy drinks did the groups consume during that time? We didn’t ask. 

teams from around the globe

With teams from Sweden, United States, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Belarus, and the UK, the Hackathon certainly represented the international inriver Partner Network. From the 13 teams who registered, we received entries from seven. Unfortunately, a few didn’t have their entry ready by the deadline. But what was the challenge?

solving real business problems

Revolving around the inriver roadmap value stream, Empowering User Efficiency, the aim of the Hackathon was for teams to build apps that helped customers focus on the right things and take action. The specific challenge for the teams was to create one or several actionable dashboard widgets that kickstart customer’s work in inriver.

Besides their own creativity, there was a heap of goodies in the Hackathon toolbox to help the Partner teams create a stand-out winning dashboard widget.

judging criteria

The quality of the entries was very high, and the Partners certainly didn’t make it easy for the inriver judges to pick a winner.

Besides empowering the user, the judges evaluated submissions based on creativity, usability, real-world impact, and whether it improved the existing inriver offering. The teams could also earn bonus points. How? There were two ways

• Use inriver’s APIs
• Include AI / Machine Learning (ML) in the process

winning teams

The inriver judges narrowed it down to the Top Three Finalists. Then at PIMpoint, we revealed the winner. Who was it?
To keep the excitement and suspense going a little longer, in reverse order:

2nd Runner Up

Aperture Labs, from the United States. Their AI-powered widget lets users take quick action directly from the dashboard to rectify and link any orphan entity. What stood out for the judges? It was excellent to show how Microsoft Azure Custom Vision ML, trained on the customer’s own images and keywords could get better matches during the prediction phase in the inriver dashboard widget. 

1st Runner Up

Xsarus, from The Netherlands, brought us Ask Pim! This dashboard bot certainly empowered the user. The judges noted that the widget was a great way to showcase the Microsoft Azure bot framework with inriver API to provide chatbot functionality directly in inriver’s dashboard. They also loved the wordplay on the Dutch man’s name Pim, for the bot’s name.

Winner

Immeo. Our Danish partner brought us My Tasks, which contains a complete workflow within the widget. The widget prompts users to work through their tasks directly from the dashboard. For instance, they see what they need to progress on a country and product level. By drilling down, the widget presents the products in a Kanban view according to status. By clicking on the product, the user moves to the approval page, where they see color code- and description suggestions from Azure cognitive services. In addition to the excellent UX features, the judges were impressed by the instant feedback without leaving the dashboard.  

winning idea

Justinas Jocius, Immeo Team Captain, said that they had tapped into the feedback from customers who wanted both a general and specific overview tied together with workflow and approval. And the idea doesn’t stop there. The team was already thinking about version 2.0 that would use ML for suggestions and history. All the weekends and evenings that the team worked on their entry certainly paid off.

Viktor Bergqvist, Head of Innovation Labs, observed that the Hackathon showed the endless possibilities inriver dashboard widgets, combined with inriver’s open APIs and AI/ML, could offer customers. And the great news? The widget functionality is part of the inriver N4 release. Everyone can then build personalized widgets for their dashboards.

Thanks to all the teams who took part. We look forward to seeing what next year’s Hackathon brings.

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