Pi Hackathon winner Akshay Surve
By Bala Shah

Leading Indian Startups, Business and Tech blog pluGGd.in (Pi) hosted a Hackathon On Nov 4, 2011. At the Pluggd.in Hackathon event, Indian startups shared their API details and ‘sold’ the APIs to developers. Hackers also had the choice to build independent hacks (or use Twitter, Google etc APIs). 49 hackers attended this Bangalore event, and by all accounts it was a success.

Techgoss caught up with Akshay Surve who won the top spot at the Pi Hackathon.  A Ruby and Ruby on Rails expert, Akshay’s core competencies are in leading mass user web applications. He has worked in different roles - from being the founder of key social ventures to that of being a code junkie with high-tech web startups.

Akshay Surve has also won the ‘Best Socially Mobile’ hack in the Yahoo Open Hack Day for mobile applications for Kiva held in 2009.

Techgoss (TG): What was your Idea for the Pi Hackathon?  How did you think it up?
Akshay Surve: I am a big fan of local lifestyle websites like Zomato and I use them quite frequently. Till a day before the hackathon I had a completely different idea in mind; to build publisher widget framework and use it for Zomato. But it was the night before the hackathon when I pivoted. Me and my friend Prayas were discussing of how mechanical and boring these sites are and how we could make them more exciting and personal. Prayas is an artist who does exhibitions and I was trying to explain to him how we could imbibe the 'curation' process followed in art galleries on lifestyle sites. Also during the discussion I also realized that I had two personal grudges with most of the lifestyle websites – they are more like 'Search Engines' / no discovery or serendipity:

Most lifestyle websites are more like search engines which help you to find out good places or events to go to but you have to seed them with what you are looking for. Example, if I'm looking for a Chinese place I can go an search for good Chinese places in and around a locality of my choice but a lot of times I just feel like trying something new or undiscovered. Most of these websites fail and are a drag when it comes to discovery or wow-ing the users.

Most of these websites feel too 'mechanical'. Every box on the sidebar like the 'People who visited this page; also visited here', 'Recommended places' or 'Recent Additions' etc. feel very mechanical. Almost like a computer generated list; which is irritating. I was sure going to use computer generated algorithms in the background but wanted to make sure that it feels like a 'curated list' as we do in an art gallery.

Bazinga! The seed for our idea Zwingmo was sown but considering it was very late in the night I wanted to sleep over the thought to take a final call in the morning. Entrepreneurs should 'sleep' over their ideas or they may end up suffering the morning-after syndrome.

The next morning when I got up things were much more clear in my head - I knew I wanted to address the problems I had identified and make a personal statement of how I see these lifestyle sites evolving in the near future. To top it up I added two more ingredients to the mix:

The first is Social (Facebook connect): Food and events that most of these sites publish are social events and it just makes natural sense to leverage our existing social network and make it a more 'social' experience.

The second ingredient is the 'Magazine rack' experience: When you log into Zwingmo - you feel as if you are looking at magazine rack nicely stacked up and you look at the one you find interesting. There are some which are labelled as 'popular', 'new' or 'featured' to aid discovery.

TG: How much time did it take you to develop it at the Pluggd.in hackathon?  Did you travel from Mumbai to Bangalore for the contest?
Akshay: The hackathon was only for 32 hours. Considering I was alone in the team while others had teamed up in teams of 2 to 4 I knew I had very little time. So, of the 32 hours - I must have utilized close to 29 hours straight - no naps and no sleep; just food and drinks break. Just to make sure that I don't doze of just before the presentation I took a quick shower at the venue :)

Yes, I travelled from Mumbai to Bangalore just for the hackathon. I have been for hackathons before here in Bangalore - the last one was at Yahoo Bangalore which I also happened to win. But the Pluggd.in hackathon was special as Ashish Sinha the founder of Pluggd.in added an interesting twist; he got Indian startups to showcase / release their API and got hackers to build interesting and innovative products on top of these APIs. I couldn't have missed this as I really wanted to promote this initiative. I have been part of the startup ecosystem for the last 4-5 years and this was the first time I was wow-ed by an initiative.