A group of engineers from Gamota JSC won the US$80,000 FbStart award, creating a social network management application that came out the victor at the Facebook Hackathon contest.

The contest was co-organised by Facebook and UP Co-working Space in Ha Noi.

The award includes VND20 million in cash, Facebook’s services and sponsors for startups.

Nguyen Tai Tue, the group leader, told VietnamPlus that instead of spending time filtering comments, the application allows fanpage managers to read only important comments based on a keyword-filtering algorithm.

In addition, the application can also filter spam and rude comments by automatically blocking accounts that repeat comments many times.

Especially, the application can help users track rival fanpages to detect photo copyright infringement.

In the 24 hour contest, the team could only finish the beta version of the product with basic functions, said Tue, adding that he plans to finish the product in the future.

Viet Nam is emerging as a major innovation centre between programmer community and enterprises, said Alice Wei, head of Facebook’s strategic product partnerships in the ASEAN region.

Facebook’s purpose for organising Facebook Hackathon was to help startup teams to define their scope and targets to develop products, she said.

Facebook would also support programmers to access more than 45 million Facebook users in Viet Nam to achieve their business goal, she added. — VNS