InMobi honours memory of Information Freedom icon Aaron Swartz with 24-hour hackathon

08th February 2014
InMobi honours memory of  Information Freedom icon Aaron Swartz with 24-hour hackathon

Bangalore, February 8, 2014:The world’s largest independent mobile advertising network, InMobi, salutes, an icon of the Internet Age and a fierce proponent of Freedom of Information -- Aaron Swartz, who died a just over a year ago, in January 2013. In tandem with similar developer events worldwide to honour his memory, InMobi inaugurated the the India edition of the Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon – ‘Freedom Hack’, at its campus in Bangalore.
Centered on the theme: O'SMAC--Others, Social, Mobile and Cloud -- 47 teams hacked away in the areas of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Other relevant domains
Projects being tackled include developing a portable ‘Knowledge Box’ that contains information for anyone to use even in the absence of Internet, analyzing Indian voter IDs and weeding out duplicate and illegal entries, developing a platform where users can choose the nature of ads they want to receive on their device to name a few.
“I truly believe in knowledge sharing and this is also something Aaron Swartz stood for,” said Michiel de Jong, a Dutch programmer who travels for such events and is developing the Knowledge Box. His partner, Rahul Kondi, a second year engineering student is supporting him with graphic designing. “I love attending events like these. The environment here, today, is excellent as everyone is focused on their projects and it is very inspiring,” said Rahul, who also designed the promotional poster for the hackathon for college audiences.
Software engineers by profession Anurag Sharma and Tarun Kochar, whose project involved weeding out inaccuracies in the Indian voters ID listing, were thrilled to be participating in their first-ever hackathon. “The culture of learning and development at InMobi is amazing and they have organized the event very well,” said Anurag. “We are hoping to complete our project by this evening and come back tomorrow for the award ceremony.”
“At InMobi, we are excited and inspired by technology. We want to continually push the envelope by trying new things,” said Mohit Saxena, Co-founder & Vice President – Technology, InMobi during the inauguration of the hackathon. “The Freedom Hack in memory of Aaron Swartz is a perfect platform for us to explore new ideas and celebrate open source and free software. We are happy to bring the technology community together through this initiative to code, innovate and learn.”
The event concludes on February 9, 2014. The top three teams chosen will be awarded prizes worth Rs. 50,000, Rs.30, 000 and Rs.20, 000 respectively.
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. He was hailed as "an online icon" who helped to make a virtual mountain of information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documentsSwartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami. Swartz's later work focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.