In the last weekend of April, Lithuania’s Vilnius Tech Park hosted technology solutions contest Hacker Games Pro: Aviation. The hackathon, designed to foster cooperation between airline companies and startups, attracted tech enthusiasts from Lithuania, Tajikistan, Russia and Belarus. Among the presented business ideas was a system, which plans trips around the world, a cargo transportation reservations platform and an augmented reality app.

The team called ‘DreamBIG’, that created a prototype of an augmented reality educational app, became the winner of the hackathon.

The app will help passengers to learn more about their plane, its parts and safety instructions by showing animations and interactive puzzles. In addition, the app will contain different thematic filters, which allow to take portrait pictures with elements of augmented reality.

According to the creators, this educational app will be attractive not only for kids, but also for adults, willing to kill boredom during the flight.

The winners received 3000 EUR cash prize, provided by App in the Air, and a 3-month membership at Vilnius Tech Park, with an opportunity to continue development of their business with help of experts from different fields and receive primary investment by Lithuania’s accelerator StartupHighway.

In total, 8 business ideas were presented during Hacker Games Pro: Aviation.

Among the projects was an internet platform Eightydays.me from Belarus. Currently, the platform allows its users to plan trips in a few clicks around different countries in Europe and North America. However, during the hackathon, the team set up a new goal – to create an option to plan trips around the world. According to the creators of Eightydays.me, the new feature will be launched by June.

One more business idea was presented by the team of students from Tajikistan, currently studying at university in Lithuania. They presented a prototype of the system called AirTrans, which is a cooperation platform for cargo shipping companies and airlines. The platform allows to compare prices of transportation service by airlines and find a partner for cargo shipping or parcel delivery. According to the team, they plan to continue working on this prototype and develop it to become a fully functional product.

Other innovative ideas included an app, which sells flight tickets based on the lottery principle, personal travelling planning assistant and a system, which allows to choose a seat on the plane near other passengers according to their interests or profession.

The second Hacker Games Pro contest was dedicated to aviation and travelling industry technologies. Lithuania’s leisure airline Small Planet Airlines and Russia’s startup App in the Air, which has more than 2.5 million users worldwide, provided various data for the participants of the hackathon.

Vilnius Tech Park’s managing director Darius Zakaitis is convinced that Hacker Games Pro project is beneficial for the region’s business ecosystem: “I believe that every participant of the aviation hackathon had an opportunity not just to develop his or her business idea, but also to learn from other participants. During the event, additional value was created by industry experts, who shared insights from the aviation and travelling industries and consulted participants throughout the event. This is the best way to test your skills and make first steps towards your own business. In addition, this is a great way for enterprises to encourage their employees to develop new ideas and find out their hidden talents”, says Mr. Zakaitis.

According to him, teams only had 48 hours to create a prototype of their business idea and present it to the jury: “The event has proved that you don’t need several months to develop a business project. All what you need is a motivated team and a few days.”

Tech enthusiasts had a chance to develop their own business ideas or to create mixed teams with Small Planet Airlines specialists.

Hacker Games Pro was organized by Vilnius Tech Park and Startup Lithuania. The main goal of this project is to encourage cooperation between enterprises and startups and to allow the experts of different fields to contribute to the development of new business ideas.