KONE has announced the launch of "SmartElevator Challenge" for developers and hackathon enthusiasts in association with IBM & HackerEarth. Organised by HackerEarth, the hackathon will be powered by IBM Watson IoT platform on IBM Bluemix Cloud platform.

The goal of the Hackathon is to encourage developers to come up with ideas for smart elevators to enhance user safety & experience and develop utility tools for KONE by applying open ideation using IBM's Watson IoT platform.

This platform will enable device connectivity and provide the ability to derive real time insights based on rules, which developers can leverage to build intelligent elevator solutions.

The three phased Hackathon started with a phase one online registration which commenced on December 26, 2016. By the time registrations closed on February 5, 2017, over ~ 2300people across India had registered for this challenge.

During the second phase of the offline event, scheduled between February 18 - 26, 2017 in Bengaluru and Chennai, the top 60 shortlisted teams will develop and present their ideas.

The third phase will involve the top 15 teams demonstrate the integration of their prototypes with real elevators at the Chennai R&D center on March 4, 2017.

The winning team will be rewarded with a cash prize of Rs.4 Lakhs and will win a chance to work with KONE's R&D center in Finland to further develop the actual idea.

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