As a part of its 10th anniversary, ecommerce major Flipkart wants to do something for Bengaluru, it’s based out of: It wants to help sort out the city’s traffic woes.
NDTV reports that Flipkart has launched ‘The Gridlock Hackathon’, which goes live today. This is the company’s initiative where it is asking them to come on to the platform and share ideas and help come up with solutions to Bengaluru’s traffic troubles.
Utkarsh B, Flipkart’s chief architect told NDTV that Flipkart is creating an open innovation platform in its own small way. “People can come in, collaborate, discuss, and brainstorm. And seed certain ideas that can help solve part of the problem. It could be small localised junctions like Silk Board junction, KR Puram junction - what can be done for that. Or it could be a micro problem Flipkart is invested towards," he said.
Utkarsh says that while Bengaluru is certainly facing the brunt of traffic, Flipkart wants to see if there is a systemic solve to it by partially or completely leveraging technology.
“We being a technology power house, can we create this platform, nudge people and motivate them? It is the power of collective will. We will be setting up a portal where people can come and register their teams," he added.
Every participant entering the hackathon will be given two weeks to work on their ideas. Submissions will then close and the best ideas will be shortlisted based on the idea’s feasibility, impact and relevance. The top 10 teams will present their ideas before a jury.
Flipkart says it is not looking for theoretical solutions but those that can be converted into a working prototype.
On July 1, the best solutions will be presented and the top three winners will get Flipkart vouchers worth two lakhs, one lakh and 50,000 respectively.
Image: Eirik Refsdal