LAHORE: Abacus Consulting in collaboration with its partners organizes Pakistan’s first-ever APIthon at National Incubation Center, Lahore. APIthon’s core objective is to break the silos in the economy by enabling startups and entrepreneurs to explore new opportunities by consuming digital assets of telco and banking sectors.
Now it is for the first time in Pakistan that Telco and Banking sector have exposed their digital assets to their consumers and developers. This is the start of an era in which we will continue to see some amazing apps coming up in Pakistan as more and more companies are opening up their APIs for the developer community. We received a huge response from 250+ teams both locally and globally from the tech startup community including Indian teams who were interested in attending this event. However, after the thorough review, 20+ teams were shortlisted.
Among the judges were Abbas Ali Khan, MD Abacus Consulting; Khurram Zafar, Executive Director LCE LUMS, Ali Mukhtar, CEO Fatima Ventures; Badar Khushnood, Co-Founder Bramerz, Khurram Shaikh, Chief Digital Officer JS Bank, Amir Aftab, Head of Digital & IT Development Telenor Pakistan; Humayun Sabir Aziz, CIO Telenor Bank and Omer Moeen Malik, Head of Digital Payment Telenor Bank.
‘Bike It’ team won special prize and made direct entry onto the final stage of second cohort of National Incubation Center Lahore.‘Dream X’ was also announced as a winner and were awarded cash prize of Rs.100,000 by JS Bank alongside securing direct entry onto the final stage of Telenor Acceleration Program.‘E-Khaata’ team stood at 2nd Runner Up spot and won VR Headsets from Telenor Bank while ‘Repair Wala’ secured 1st Runner Up spot and won VR Headsets from JS Bank and Smart Watch from Telenor Bank.
25% of the world economy has been digitized already and there is the huge contribution of APIs in making it happen. More and more companies are realizing the opportunities that lie in either exposing their digital assets through APIs and letting developers make new products/apps and collaborating and communicating with each other by consuming their APIs.
The purpose of API based hackathon ‘APIthon’ is to make developers realize the number of opportunities that lie if they learn how to explore & consume APIs using portals of the respective companies, with zero human interaction at all.
Technical teams of Telenor, Telenor Bank, JS Bank and Apigee were available on both days of the event at National Incubation Center, Lahore, where APIthon was organized. Startups and a team of developers participated in the event and they got the chance to not only meet the technical teams of the aforementioned companies but they also got direct mentorships from the industry’s renowned IT Gurus – this helped them learn how to consume APIs with efficiency and accuracy. Projects of participating teams were judged by the experts so that developers can learn the mistakes they made while consuming APIs to create new apps.
This event was held in partnership with Momentum Tech Conference, Apigee, JS Bank, Telenor Bank, Easypaisa, Careem (Official Travel Partner), Careem Erupt, National Incubation Center Lahore, TechJuice, MITEFP and IDG (Digital Media Partner) and Naqeebz (Media & PR Partner). News Desk
