23 Jun 2012

To Innovation and Beyond - Hackathon

An award for innovating and prototyping a new idea for media capture in the Disney Parks.

To Innovation and Beyond, Summer 2012 was a department wide innovation competition at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts. The aim was to generate new concepts for capturing and selling guest media in the theme parks at Walt Disney World.

The employees, or cast members as they are called at Disney, had the option of forming their own teams and were given 24 hours to formulate and present the idea to the whole department and upper management.

Mine was the only all intern team, and we spent our one day trying to leverage existing infrastructure as much as possible to enhance guest takeaway. I cannot expound more on the actual idea here for legal reasons, but I wrote an Android app that scans media and talks to our systems over the network. This was meant to be a prototype.

As interns, we were quite proud to win the third place competing with much senior cast members. Moreover, we were elated when the upper management wanted to talk to us about actually implementing our idea. Sleep-deprived, but aww yeah!