Bharti Airtel has announced its partnership with the Meta-owned popular Messaging app WhatsApp. Both companies have jointly announced Airtel IQ Hackathon. This hackathon will give new opportunities for startups in India and also invite them to build business solutions using the WhatsApp Business Platform. Let’s see the details.
Airtel IQ Hackathon
Airtel IQ hackathon aims to solve customer engagement problems by hacking for a connected future and solving business challenges. Further, it aims to offer emerging Indian startups, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and the student community an opportunity to support technology and drive customer experience and better customer engagement, the telco said in a statement.
The hackathon will target five key sectors of the economy, namely E-Commerce, Ed-Tech, Banking and Financial Services (BFSI), Travel and Tourism, and Contact centre operations.
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Airtel IQ Hackathon Prize Money
Airtel IQ Hackathon offers prizes worth up to Rs 1 Crore. Applications will close on 09 October 2022, and participants will be evaluated over three rounds and a mega finale on Dec 1st, 2022. Apart from the cash prize, winners will get free access to free conversations on the WhatsApp Business Platform and the WhatsApp API, helping them reduce their operating costs.
In addition, winners will also get an opportunity to grasp Airtel Business’s expansive channel network to achieve reach and scale with enterprises.
Furthermore, a select few startups would be offered to join the Airtel Startup Accelerator Program and hyper-scale their company with Airtel. Under this Program, in addition to the funding in the range of $500K – $2M, startups gain access to Airtel’s core platform strengths of data, distribution, network, and payments. Further, startups get access to Airtel’s global partner ecosystem and advisory from Airtel’s executive team.
Airtel says that the hackathon is part of a range of projects the company has initiated, intending to develop and enhance India’s technology talent. The telco wants to employ more women engineers and is also setting up a dedicated tech centre in Pune to house tech talent across fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics.
WhatsApp and Jio Partnership
Late last month, Reliance Jio announced the launch of JioMart in association with WhatsApp, where consumers can shop directly from their WhatsApp chat. JioMart on WhatsApp allows users in India to easily browse through JioMart’s entire grocery inventory. They can add products to carts and then pay for their purchases.
To use the service, users can simply send a ‘Hi’ to the JioMart number (+917977079770) on WhatsApp. After customers add the products to their cart, they can complete their transactions without leaving the WhatsApp chat.
Through JioMart, Jio and Meta aim to offer easy and hassle-free shopping for its customers in India via WhatsApp. The partnership is said to speed up India’s digital transformation and provide people and businesses of all sizes opportunities to connect in new ways.
On the launch, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Meta said, “Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp — people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum, and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come.”