Singapore Airlines : Winner of Singapore Airlines' First-Ever Technology Challenge Emerges

12 October 2015- More than 100 students from eight Singapore-based universities and polytechnics participated in the finale event of Singapore Airlines' (SIA) first-ever technology challenge over the weekend, pitting their skills against one another to win attractive prizes and the honour of being the inaugural champion of the 'SIA App Challenge'. The finale event took place on Saturday, 10 October 2015 at NUS Enterprise@Blk71.

Based on the theme of 'Your Travel, Your Way', participants from 30 teams were provided two real-world business challenges related to the aviation industry and were tasked with developing digital applications suited for the modern traveller. Details of the business challenges can be found at Annex A.

Team EnthuSIAst impressed the judges with their prototype, which enhances the end-to-end inflight experience between passengers and cabin crew, and emerged victorious as the winner of the Challenge. The first and second runners-up were Team Invulnerable and Team Lambda. Teams were evaluated based on the following criteria: innovation, business value, technical competency and user experience.

For the best use of our partners' development platform and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Team Proz won the Best IBM Bluemix Award. Team EnthuSIAst received the MasterCard Pay & Fly Challenge prize, while Team Yoda received the Best Usage of Skyscanner API prize. More information on the prototypes by the top three teams and the list of schools which participated can be found at Annex B. High resolution images of the Challenge are available upon request.

The top team won a trip to Silicon Valley in the US, the global capital of technology and innovation, where they will meet with executives from companies such as Google and IBM. The second and third place teams won 50,000 and 30,000 KrisFlyer miles, respectively. The winning team and selected participants may also be offered an internship stint with SIA.

Registration commenced on 4 August 2015 and received overwhelming responses from various tertiary institutions. The competition began with a Kick-Off session on 3 October where the business challenges and tools such as development platforms and APIs from leading aviation and technology partners were shared with close to 180 participants.

Partners and sponsors of the event included Amadeus, IBM, MasterCard, NUS Enterprise, SITA, Skyscanner, Tata Consultancy Services and Tibco Mashery. Participants received guidance from these renowned industry partners and Google, as well as Singapore Airlines representatives, as they developed their application prototypes over the period of a week.

'All the participants have much to be proud of as they displayed a great sense of creativity and determination when developing their applications. Although they were only given a short period of time to work on their prototypes, they rose to the challenge and were able to marry technology with their newfound knowledge of the aviation industry to the best of their abilities. Singapore Airlines and our partners would like to congratulate all who participated in the Challenge on a job well done,' said Singapore Airlines Senior Vice President Information Technology, Mr George Wang.

SIA App Challenge - Business challenges

Challenge 1:

Delighting customers is the cornerstone of SIA's service philosophy. At various customer touch-points such as booking a ticket online, checking in at the airport, being on board our flights and receiving post-flight follow-up, we seek to provide exceptional service to our business and leisure customers.

Make use of digital opportunities to delight our customers further. Be creative! Develop an application that engages with customers to offer a personalised, rewarding and stress-free travel experience.

Challenge 2:

Through social media platforms, our customers are able to engage with us and others who travel on SIA. How can social media be used to encourage engagement among SIA customers who share common profiles (e.g. same business industry, taking the same flight)?

Develop an application that facilitates such social media engagement amongst SIA customers, whilst preserving customers' preference for privacy (e.g. on board the aircraft).

ANNEX B

Details on top three teams' prototypes and list of participating schools

Winner: Team EnthuSIAst
Description of prototype: Enhancing the end-to-end inflight experience between passengers and cabin crew

First Runner-up: Team Invulnerable
Description of prototype: Improving the resting patterns of passengers on board

Second Runner-up: Team Lambda
Description of prototype: Virtual inflight assistant

If you are a member of the media and want to find out more about us

Public Affairs Departmentpublic_affairs@singaporeair.com.sg

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