Startup Wins Hackathon with a Samsung Gear 2 App at Dreamforce 2014

With insightful speeches from industry leaders and dazzling performances from celebrities, Dreamforce is the major B2B conference and event of the season that has been attracting hundreds of thousands attendees annually. One of the feature events at Dreamforce is its hackathon, an app development competition for developers; this year, 300 teams and 700 people participated in the 48-hour competition on October 10 to develop a mobile app on Salesforce technology.

The competition was divided into three categories ‘Build an app with Force.com’, ‘Build an app with Heroku’, ‘Build and app with Force.com + Heroku.’

The hackathon was targeted towards mobile apps for business as well as the general public and corporate customers. The team that developed the most innovative mobile apps in each division was awarded a $100,000 prize, and the grand prizewinner won $150,000.

The Engage team developed a winning app, using a Gear 2, and their engineering knowledge. Their idea won first place from Samsung and also went on to win first place in the ‘Build an app with Force.com’ category with an award of $100,000.

The Engage team’s mobile app for Samsung Gear 2 enables workers to access information and to generate better performance when they receive calls especially out of office. Integrated with the Salesforce CRM system, the app captures critical customer data, logs incoming and outgoing calls automatically, and displays widgets on the Gear 2 that provides salespeople with relevant information about the caller.

The Engage team promoted their solutions at the Samsung booth. Also, the Engage team established new company to commercialize solutions (Company Engage, www.engagecall.com)

For B2B salespeople working out of the office, this app lets them respond to inquiries and requests of their customers when they are away from their desks. Using wearable devices in this manner improves work efficiency and quality and can expect good feedback from the market.

Dreamforce Overview

Samsung Electronics attended Dreamforce 2014 in San Francisco this year from October 13-16. Held at the San Francisco City Center, the 12th annual event was a huge success with 140,000 attendees. Over 450 companies were represented including Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and PWC, etc.

Annually held for Salesforce.com customers, developers and other B2B companies, Dreamforce is a colorful event with celebrities, speeches and performances showcasing Salesforce.com as a global leader with various enterprise solutions including CRM.

In addition to combining industry vision, product specialists and world class leaders, valuable business perspectives and opportunities to network, it is not an exaggeration to call this major influential B2B event – which focused on “the future of cloud, social, mobile and connected technologies and how companies are connecting with customers in a whole new way” – as the most prominent software event of the season.

Samsung Electronics’ Participation

Samsung Electronics participated in Dreamforce for the first time this year with the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active and wearable device ‘Gear series’ for enterprise solutions. Samsung Electronics demonstrated how these devices could be linked with the Salesforce solution for field workers, including the ability to make annotations directly on photos using the S-pen and PDA/GPS integration, which received great attention from the customers.