For each Hackathon we look retrospectively to make sure we are consistently providing value to Movio, and that we bring an exciting and engaging experience to everyone in our team.

A few key outtakes this year was that our previous Hackathon was a little unclear on the participant expectations. We had awards but it was unclear on what you had to do to win them. It felt quite directed at technical teams and others were unsure of ‘how they could get involved’.

This time we decided to put a major focus on the awards and define them as categories to build towards. We wanted these awards to celebrate the diverse talent Movio has and it was also important to set awards that would drive the behaviors we value most in Hackathons including:

• Team Building: A time to break down walls and work with people you otherwise wouldn’t and an opportunity to work in another team’s space.
• Innovation: An opportunity to play with areas you don’t get to on your day to day, be it technologies, or communication mediums.
• Inspiration: The freedom to think outside of ‘business as usual’ and draw inspiration on new ways to connect moviegoers to their ideal movies.

Giving Back Award

We find that our Movio crew gain a large amount of satisfaction when helping out others. This award therefore was created for a team that chooses to ‘give back’ to others at Movio, using their abilities to influence another team in the business.

Runner up: Roadrunners
‘Month with Movio Cinema Roadrunners’ concept was to partially automate the process of sending a monthly client report in order to free up resources, minimize errors and increase staff satisfaction. The current process is a very manual and time-consuming task that occurs at the beginning of every month. At the end of the 24 hours, an easy-to-use interface was created that meant reports could be automatically pulled from the CRM and matched with a data science report. Saving roughly 14 hours of work across different departments each month.

Winner: Movio CLI
Movio is lucky to work in an industry where we’re able to develop tools we use every day. The Movio CLI team aggregated some of the struggles and annoyance developers have in their daily life and tried to ease them using the best possible interface - command line. Such as switching between clusters, rotating credentials, getting shared data, installing dev tools on a new machine, etc. One of the goals was to create a precedent of sharing our tools between developers from different teams and to promote more active collaboration in this field.

Visual Award

This was awarded to the team that produced something visually stunning. It can give insight into something that is otherwise hard to understand and makes it clear through visual representation.

Runner up: Spotlight
Spotlight was created to bring Cinema specific reporting to the executive teams on a single mobile-accessible dashboard. It was an exploration of finding the most important data to show at a glance, which was hypothesized as showing untapped revenue for all currently showing films.

Winner: MovioVille
Movioville was a stop-motion film on a mission to visualize the Movio codebase and explore the life of Jeff, a new employee in our Engineering Team being exposed to code. It was an accurate representation of the ‘cost’ behind codebases, and why it's important they are maintained appropriately.

Tech Award

This award was created after a conversation that some Hackathons have produced work that is technically amazing but it can be hard to generalize to a crowd in order to get a vote. Often these projects get implemented in production after the Hackathons and genuinely improve the tech space at Movio, we wanted to recognize this and have it as something for teams to strive for.

Winner: The Movio Concierge
The Movio Concierge combines the power of moviegoer behaviour and real-time transactions to create a unique and tailored moviegoing experience for each customer. This is accomplished through Movio's Data Warehouse, a newly developed recommender system and a newly released real-time feed from selected exhibitors.

Shark Tank Award

This award was created for something that has real product potential. Something that fits in the space of Movio, with our mission to connect every moviegoer with their ideal movie. Something that could provide a real impact for our customers.

Winner: Year in Review
Year in Review is a Movio centric version of a few loyalty program‘ end of year summary’ for their customer base, with the idea of surfacing the year they have enjoyed at the cinema. Reminding the customer of the movies they watched, concessions they enjoyed and how their movie choices compared to others. It turns out we had a few people in our company who had some unique movie choices. It was also able to suggest movies that we had missed throughout the year and based on what we had watched, we would enjoy it.

With little guidance outside our awards, the result the teams produced was truly inspirational. The drive and enjoyment the teams showed through the 24 hours was incredible. All projects presented had real value to Movio and it was undoubtedly the hardest Hackathon to vote on yet.

Congratulations to all the teams who participated and we look forward to seeing which of these projects make it to production and continue to bring the magic of Movio Hackathons to our customers and industry.

Keen to join the Movio Crew? Check out our current job openings here.