Our fifth annual Thanksgiving Hackathon
This year’s winners were the Friendly Owls
Continuing our long-standing company tradition, we celebrate Thanksgiving at Smarkets by hosting a hackathon, and follow it up with a traditional (and very tasty) dinner prepared by our wonderful chefs.
After our kickoff breakfast, the teams raced against the clock to bring their ideas from inception to reality during the day — with everyone in the team helping by bringing their unique skills to the project.
Once the day is coming to an end, each team also puts together a short presentation to demo their project to the company and take their best shot at showing that their invention was the best this year.
All hackathon participants then vote on their favourite three creations with three points for their favourite, two for second, and one for third.
This year’s winners were The Friendly Owls, who brought a new UI to our flagship SBK sportsbook product inspired by ‘swipe’ style dating apps — to help our users find their perfect bet to match with. The project was called SBBae!
Since the Friendly Owls were a team of engineers from our LA office, they submitted their presentation for viewing as a Hollywood-style video (of course) documenting both their process of building the project and demoing the new UI.
With a fantastic product idea, executed well, and a video demo worthy of a screening at the Cannes Film Festival, they soared into the lead on the points and earned themselves a very well deserved victory. Congratulations!
Following up close in second place were The Mighty Butterflies with their horse-focused Smarkets Exchange clone, Smarekets, and finishing third were The Delightful Donkeys with their product assistant inspired by Microsoft Clippy, Smarklip.
The Smarkets Hackathon is a great way to bring the whole company together for the day and to spend time working on a fun project with those you wouldn’t typically be collaborating with.
While we won’t be changing the SBK UI to the SBBae mode just yet, all of the projects gave us inspiration for the future, helping to bring innovative ideas to the company — not bad for a day rounding off with a delicious Thanksgiving dinner!
Smarkets is hiring! View all current openings and apply here: https://smarkets.com/careers/
