VCU news

By Brian McNeill

A team of three Virginia Commonwealth University students won $10,000 in a San Francisco hackathon for designing an innovative mobile app that makes it easier for salespeople to pull up customers' information while talking on the phone.

Matthew Bates, Matthew Jenkins and Allen Calderwood — all of whom are students in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering — took 10th place in their category, beating out more than 300 teams competing in the Dreamforce hackathon.

The competition, hosted by Salesforce, a cloud-computing company best known for its customer relationship management product, required the teams to develop a mobile app using one of the company's products.

The VCU students designed an Android app called "Salesforce on the Go," which connects with Salesforce's cloud-based system that handles and stores customer information. When a salesperson is away from the office and receives a call from a customer, the app automatically delivers that customer's information to the salesperson's Android wristwatch.  

"When you're traveling and you receive a call from a customer, you normally either have to open the app [on your phone] or open up your laptop to see this person's information," Calderwood said. "With our app, as soon as you got a call, it would contact the Salesforce website, get that caller's information and display it on your watch."

The app also allowed the salesperson to easily record notes from the call.

"In a call center, a typical agent would record notes on a phone call. Doing that process — opening up the app or your laptop, and then going to the website — can take a lot of time," he said. "With our app, you just swipe two times, and then you can talk to the app and it'll record notes for you. It takes literally a matter of seconds to record the notes."

The event marked the third time Calderwood has won in a hackathon, and it was the first win for Bates and Jenkins.

Calderwood said it was a "completely unreal experience compared to any other hackathon we have ever competed in before, but we were very confident in our chances to win because we had a very well-defined project and clear application with business potential."

The team's trip was sponsored by AMC Technology, a Richmond company that provides multi-channel contact center integration software. The company also supported the team's computer science capstone senior project, the idea for which was used in writing the mobile app.

The team's win is the latest in a string of strong showings by VCU students at recent hackathons. In early September, for example, another team — Mark Kolev, David Jackson, Brian Glass and George Pottanat — took part in the HopHacks hackathon at Johns Hopkins University and won "Best Health Care Hack."

 

Feature image at top - left to right: Engineering students Matthew Jenkins, Allen Calderwood and Matthew Bates won $10,000 at the Salesforce Hackathon in San Francisco for an app they created called "Salesforce on the Go."

 

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