Cisco DevNet Partnering with Smart India Hackathon to Help Digitize the Country!

Digitizing a country is not an easy task. However, Shri Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, wants to make this real for his country to bridge the digital divide and drive growth in the country. The Smart India Hackathon 2018 is a unique initiative in its second year.  Its goal is to ignite the creativity of student talent and build digital technology innovations for solving real challenges faced by the country.

Cisco DevNet is partnering with the Inter Institutional Inclusive Innovation Center (i4C), and Persistent Systems to sponsor this hackathon. DevNet will offer students learning resources and expert help around Cisco’s industry proven platforms that can be leveraged to solve country obstacles. Cisco Spark, Meraki, and IoT platforms provide functionality like bots, location scanning data, and connected city information that could be applied to a specific need.

[Updated 3/27] We are excited to see 14,887 great proposals that were submitted during SIH2018 to solve 1060 problem statements. The DevNet team is looking forward to meeting you at several in-person Hackathon centers. If your proposal is selected for an in-person Hackathon, Cisco DevNet offers industry proven APIs and Platforms that you can use for your solution. We noticed that a lot of problems involve creating an app to digitize an existing service government provides to its citizens. Experience with these apps could be enhanced using Cisco Spark text-based conversational Chatbot to easily simulate the human response for faster customer service. Watch the latest video from Tessa Mero, Developer Evangelist, Cisco DevNet, Zero to Chatbot workshop using Cisco Spark. If you decide to use a Cisco API for your final solution, submit your proposal here and get Cisco DevNet Expert help.

Cisco DevNet aims to help our community with their need to learn, code, get inspired and connect with other like-minded members. For Smart India Hackathon, here are two amazing Facebook Live sessions that we hope inspire you to learn more about Cisco APIs and platforms. Check out:

Susie Wee, VP/CTO Cisco DevNet Innovations talking about impact of programmable infrastructure on modern applications.

Ashutosh Malegaonkar, Principal Engineer, Cisco DevNet Innovations giving technical details about using Cisco Meraki Location and Proximity Services.

Tessa Mero, Developer Evangelist, Cisco DevNet, Zero to Chatbot workshop using Cisco Spark

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) reports that only 33% of the 2million plus students graduating every year get placement. We want to make it easy for students to differentiate themselves by having key industry expertise and help digitize their country with the new skills they’ve gained.

Smart India Hackathon participants can go here to learn about these Platforms and APIs. They can also qualify to win DevNet Expert Help if using a Cisco API for their solution. Get started now!