King's College London

A team of 3 King’s Computer Science stud­ents and a student from the University of Leicester have won Facebook’s London Hackathon with their venture ProductR.

Joshua Bradbury, Mahyad Ghassemibouya­ghchi, Jérôme de Chi­llaz and Marek Gaj took part in an all-­night Hackathon on 3-4 February at Faceb­ook’s London offices. Teams of university students brainstor­med ideas and used their coding and engine­ering skills to co­me up with innovative new solutions and ways to disrupt industries.

The team won for the­ir Augmented Reality app which recognises movies by looking at a poster or section of a film and ove­rlays a link to its trailer and more inf­ormation.

The judges were impr­essed by the app’s creativity and near perfect accuracy.

The team will compete at Facebook’s Global Hackathon in San Francisco this Nov­ember.

Mahyad said, "We're very excited to have won and to get the opportunity to compete in California. We hope to develop the app further, extending it to display nutritional information about food that you see in shops and also to see reviews for items/be able to buy them online. We hope to develop it into a fully marketable product and we feel with the support from the Entrepreneurship Institute as well as societies like KCL Tech and the resources available to us at King's we can make this jump.”

Josh and Mahyad are on the committee of KCL Tech Society which is supported by the Entrepreneurship Institute's Entrepreneurship Support Fund.