App to reduce carbon footprint wins Hack the Climate Manila

MANILA, Philippines - With the goal of reducing the carbon footprint in Metro Manila especially on busy EDSA, a group of young professionals developed an application intended to encourage more people to use bicycles as their major mode of transportation.

 In their pitch during the recently held “2nd Hack the Climate Manila”, the group called the Re/cycle team said they “want to make a difference in people’s lives by getting them to adopt a green lifestyle by using bicycles”. The group further cited that doing so will not only contribute to a cleaner environment but also promote a healthy lifestyle.

 The app will include information on where bikers can eat, rest, or buy bike equipment and spare parts. Re/cycle team plans to partner with bike shops, restaurants and other business establishments catering to the needs of the cyclists. It also plans to develop a rewards system for bikers whenever they buy or eat in these establishments.

Team members JayVic San Antonio, Rhiza Talavera, Xyriz Tan, Jade Gaa, and Anna Jane Matillano received P40,000 for besting other teams that participated in the second edition of Hack the Climate Manila, the first eco-themed and longest hackathon or programming marathon in the Philippines.

In addition, they have the opportunity to pitch their application to Smart Communications for possible funding. As part of its thrust to encourage innovation, Smart introduced a jury prize in the competition to enable the developers to continue their project if they want to establish a startup in the future.

 Smart enables people to be creative in solving problems. Project Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards (NOAH) and the Batingaw apps are the products of previous hackathons.

According to Smart developer evangelist Paul Pajo, Smart continues to support Hack the Climate Manila as part of its corporate advocacy on the use of technology for social good.

“Hack the Climate helps us find ways to mitigate the effects of climate change using technology,” Pajo said. “We know the community has untapped potential to solve a problem in their area but we need to extract these by doing events such as hackathons, developer weekends, technopreneur bootcamps, AngelHack, Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekends, among others.”