Chennai: A Bengaluru-based techie emerged the winner in the two-day hackathon conducted on developing solutions to smart city programmes at VIT University.
Organised by NASSCOM, an association of Indian Information Technology, the competition saw 80,000 participants from across the country try to derive technological solutions to the societal problems: saving electricity, tracking homeless and linking them with the NGOs.
From the 80,000 applications, 600 techies were narrowed down through competitions conducted across the country. Tejas Venugopal, a 26-year-old techie from Mind Tree bagged the title, 'NASSCOMM Technology Adopter' for developing a smart power grid through Internet of Things (IoT) and block chain, a recent technological innovation.
"My plan includes developing virtual currency to purchase electricity. The concept would be useful during natural disasters which would result in a black out," Tejas told Deccan Chronicle.
"During power outage, micro grids can be used to buy and sell electricity within a community. A tracking mechanism to identify sources of energy would be helpful," he said.
The youngest participant of the hackathon, Swastik Srivastava, developed a comprehensive electrical device which could act as an analyst. The 19-year-old is the third-year Computer Science Engineering student from Army Institute of Technology, Pune.
"I have developed an electrical drive that could be attached to EB meters. The device collects the data on power consumption and sends it to the server, which analyses the pattern of the consumers," said Swastik.
