MasterCard to Hold Masters of Code Global Hackathon Competition at Impact Hub NYC

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Nov 5, 2015) -  MasterCard Masters of Code™ hackathon is coming to New York City on Saturday, November 7th through Sunday, November 8th at Impact Hub NYC, a coworking and events space for social impact professionals taking action to drive positive change. The New York City winner will have the chance to compete against master coders from the other regional events for the $100,000 USD Grand Prize at the Grand Finale in Silicon Valley.

Sponsored and hosted by MasterCard and organized by AngelHack, the Masters of Code competition is a series of weekend-long hackathons that bring together the world's top developers, designers and entrepreneurs to take on the MasterCard APIs. Using these APIs, developers have access to unsurpassed assets, data and products from MasterCard focused on powering commerce on a global scale. The participating teams compete to create innovative prototypes that demonstrate artful coding and design skills while also articulating clear business use cases -- all focused on driving the next generation of commerce applications.

For the Big Apple event, the challenge for participants will be to develop the best consumer experience using a combination of software and hardware and any MasterCard APIs -- with added bonus points earned by integrating the featured API, Simplify Commerce, or the "secret" API announced at the time of the event.

The event features an esteemed panel of judges who will decide the winning team based on their innovation's impact, design, creativity, simplicity and usage of MasterCard's APIs. The judging panel will include:

• Max Chion, Group Executive, Emerging Payments Products, MasterCard
• Karen Pascoe, Group Head, User Experience Implementation, MasterCard
• Nick Chirls, Founder & Partner, Notation Capital
• Anthony Ha, Media and Advertising Writer, TechCrunch
• Karen Webster, CEO, PYMNTS.com and CEO, Market Platform Dynamics

Martina Hund-Mejean, Chief Financial Officer at MasterCard, will deliver the opening keynote address.

"We're excited to take our global hackathon series to the city that does more thinking than sleeping. Tapping into the minds of NYC's most innovative thinkers is an opportunity for MasterCard to foster innovation in ways we never could have imagined," said Max Chion, Group Executive, Emerging Payment Products, MasterCard. "As one of the most thriving tech communities in the world, New York is an ideal city to engage many of the world's top coders. As the second to last stop in the series, we expect the competition to be intense and the ideation to be limitless."

"The sea of resources available to innovators today can be hard to navigate," says Sam Utne, Managing Director of Impact Hub NYC. "The tools exist to build almost anything you can imagine but our goal is to offer guidance and mentorship that most people don't have access to. Our goal is to create an ecosystem for innovators to launch and grow their ideas. We've partnered with great organizations who support entrepreneurs, so companies can learn how to build businesses."

This is the second Masters of Code competition hosted by MissionHUB, a network of Impact Hub campuses in San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as well as the Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) for impact investing. Prior, Impact Hub San Francisco hosted the series, also in partnership with MasterCard and AngelHack. Competitors focused on ways to increase social good by leveraging MasterCard's Simplify Commerce API to build apps aimed at improving communities via social networks and their global reach.

The 2015 Masters of Code series originally kicked off with its first event in Sydney, followed by events in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, San Francisco, Montreal, Istanbul and St. Louis. London will be the last stop for the series before the Grand Finale in Silicon Valley. For more information about the MasterCard Masters of Code competition including rules, judging criteria, prizes, etc., visit www.MastersofCode.com.

ABOUT

Impact Hub NYC is a coworking and events space for a membership community taking action to drive positive social and environmental change. Impact Hub NYC is owned and operated by MissionHUB, a global marketplace for social innovation. With Impact Hub coworking and events space campuses, in San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., MissionHUB is part of the global Impact Hub network of more than 11,000 members. Since 2008, MissionHUB has powered the Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP), dedicated to accelerating a new global market at the intersection of money & meaning. SOCAP's annual flagship event in San Francisco is the largest conference for impact investors and social entrepreneurs.

MasterCard, www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry. We operate the world's fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. MasterCard's products and solutions make everyday commerce activities -- such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances -- easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone. Follow us on Twitter @MasterCardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

AngelHack is the world's largest developer ecosystem, helping to drive open innovation of tech products, platforms and brands with extraordinary smarts, scale and speed. For more than three years AngelHack has partnered with corporate change-makers at Comcast NBCUniversal, Hasbro, IBM, Accenture, Hearst, and Cisco to run themed, global initiatives designed to rapidly prototype ideas while helping them build relationships with the workforce of the future. Find out more at www.AngelHack.com.

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