Masters of Code global hackathon coming through Asia with $100,000 grand prize

Asian developers take note: credit card company MasterCard is putting US$100,000 up for grabs in a globe-trotting hackathon set to culminate with a showdown in Silicon Valley next year. The 10-city competition, co-hosted by AngelHack, will pass through four cities in Asia: Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tel Aviv.

The Masters of Code hackathon will invite international dev teams (five members max) to design ecommerce-focused apps that utilize MasterCard’s MasterPass wallet API. Teams will also have access to a variety of MasterCard public APIs related to payments, security, and data services. Winning teams from each of the ten host cities – which also include Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Montreal, New York, and London – will be flown to Silicon Valley to compete in the grand finale. But there’s a catch – competing alongside the ten regional winners will be a hand-picked team of MasterCard’s “elite coders.” To win the US$100,000 cash prize, the top team must defeat both the regional rivals and the credit card company’s home team.

If one of the regional teams manages to knock out the other ten, they will reap benefits beyond the six-figure paycheck. Additional prizes include a two-week residency at MasterCard’s Start Path accelerator in Dublin, six months of mentoring from the finance firm’s Open API executive team, and free payment processing for up to US$250,000 in transactions for their app’s first year of service (as long as they use the MC-owned Simplify Commerce payment solution).

Teams will be judged on five different criteria for a maximum total of 25 points: impact, design, creativity, simplicity, and usage of MasterCard APIs. Each group will get two minutes to demo their creation – no PowerPoint presentations or decks allowed – and one minute to answer the judging panel’s questions.

Hackathons are becoming increasingly popular across Asia, with a number of Google-sponsored Startup Weekend events passing through the region and Tech in Asia’s own hackathons in Singapore and Indonesia just to name a few.

“We chose [Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tel Aviv] for the high concentration of entrepreneurial and developer talent,” Mario Shiliashki, MasterCard’s senior vice president of open APIs, tells Tech in Asia. Our developer program is global and we hope to reach top developers, designers, and entrepreneurs – the best and brightest coders – anywhere in the world.”

Masters of Code Asian tour dates are as follows:

• Sydney: February 7-8
• Hong Kong: March 18-19
• Singapore: March 28-29
• Tel Aviv: June 2015 (tentative)

Shiliashki adds that the final is scheduled for December 2015 in San Francisco.

See: Hackathon success stories are rare, but here are two startups that broke the mould