During this week’s Studio, the student teams discussed the results of their second Hack Day and provided updates on their company projects.
The ongoing mission for Hack Day is for groups to formulate a clear plan of what they want to build, execute it, and produce a demo of what they built at the end of the day to their peers. This month, groups were also given an extra presentation challenge: MBA students would have to explain the work MEng students did, and vice versa, echoing what we heard from Jennifer Dulski, President of Change.org, two weeks ago about the importance of becoming fluent in both the tech and business languages.
During October’s Hack Day, the group working with MasterCard made considerable progress towards developing a prototype that addresses a consumer payment need.
The group decided to simplify purchasing in the home goods industry by developing a system that alerts users when they’re running low on supplies.
They commandeered the Cornell Tech kitchen and installed sensors that detected when different kitchen supplies were low by measuring each item’s weight. Once supplies were low, they received a push notification alerting them of their need and linking them directly to Amazon.com to place the order. This was a huge success for the group, as they had previously had technical difficulties creating the sensors to measure product supply.
The group’s next steps include determining the best method for marketing their product. The group is currently choosing between working directly with manufacturers to develop sensors that are automatically included in various products, or whether they want to sell the sensor itself as a product that can be customized by all users. Although there are still lingering questions about their project, the group was proud to have created a full end-to-end design of their product during Hack Day.