Big Brand Hackathon 2012: Home Depot’s 1st Prize of $8000 Goes to a High School Student and Girls In Tech Participant!

On Monday, June 18th I attended Social Loco 2012, a conference discussing how social-location will be monetized and leveraged across industries and verticals.

Big Brand Hack-a-thon kicked off the Social Loco 2012 extravaganza on June 16th. This two-day hack-a-thon brought big brand companies like Kraft Foods, Home Depot and Nokia to judge and announce a winning product on June 17th, the last day of the hack-a-thon.

Home Depot awarded $8,000 to Nive Jayasekar, a 17-year-old high school student who will be attending Carnegie Mellon University this Fall. Her product also won the ‘Best Use of Social and Location Mashup’ for $2,500, totaling her winnings to $10,500! With a strong supportive family of female engineers, Nive has a bright future as a potential intern for Facebook this summer.  Nive says, “My mother and grandmother played a large role in making me who I am. My grandma, she only studied in India until eleventh grade. She really wanted my mother gain higher education to make up for her own lack of. She managed to put all three of her kids through higher education programs.”

Nive did not want to be an engineer in her early high school career. It wasn’t until she joined the Girls In Tech network, and was introduced to the hack-a-thon culture that she decided to shift gears from business development to computer engineering.

“In tenth grade, there was a hack-a-thon at Google hosted by Girls In Tech. That was how I got introduced to hack-a-thons in the first place. They taught me that you don’t just have to program in school. There are actually a lot of opportunities to learn and work hands-on with real problems.”

We are all anticipating what Nive will bring to tech innovation and social location applications!

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