Yahoo India has completed its first ever Agency Hack in the country. The Gold Prize was won by the team from Webchutney (Mandeep Singh, Sattvik Mishra, Gurbaksh Singh, Abhishek Saxena and Akshay Raheja) with their utilitarian hack ‘Y! Loo’ - a hardware-led hack that uses Yahoo Messenger and allows users to remotely check the status of the office loos (and conference rooms). Users can knock on the door if the loo is engaged and it is smart enough to notify the user back, once vacant.

The Webchutney Team

Team Digitas (Akshat Bhardwaj, Prosenjit Som, Sidharth K Dhanda, Vivek R Sharma) walked away with the Silver Prize for their twitter-based hack “Twinority Report”, a tweet investigator that anticipates criminal intentions ranging from drug abuse to suicide to serious national threats by analyzing keyword patterns. Bronze Prize was won by Sapient Nitro (Syed Suffiyan, Parag Gajjar) for their movie viewing companion experience platform “Lens”.

The 24-hour non-stop Hackathon was held at Gurgaon over 2nd-3rd November 2012, and the hacks were adjudged by a team comprising technology, media and marketing experts. The event saw participation from leading advertising agencies with teams from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai competing to come up with smart digital and tech-powered solutions to address real-life challenges.

In the past, Yahoo had organized Agency Hacks in New York with large advertising groups such as WPP and Publicis. This is the first time the Agency Hack has been held outside of the United States.

Agency teams comprising developers, designers, user-experience specialists, copy-writers, media planners and digital strategists got together to come up with innovative ideas and build prototype solutions within 24 hours. Participating teams could choose to either build a campaign-based solution or a product-based one using technologies from Yahoo and other players. Seven agencies, including Ogilvy, Webchutney, SapientNitro, ad2c, Digitas, Indiatimes and Reprise Media participated in this event.

“It feels awesome to have won at the first-ever Agency Hack in India. For this event we wanted to solve a problem that we ourselves face and that’s how we came up with the Y Loo. We are five people in our team, and only one has been to the US. So a trip to participate in the international hack event is thrilling. We are so kicked about it,” said Sattvik Mishra, from Webchutney.

The Agency Hack was one of the run up initiatives to the Yahoo Big Idea Chair Awards. This year’s Yahoo Big Idea Chair, has received a significant 383 entries across 8 categories. The entries will be evaluated and judged by a panel of 16 eminent jury members from diverse sectors within the marketing and advertising world. The winners will be announced at a gala event in Mumbai on November 9, 2012.