DevFest GemJam Hackathon Winners for DevFest Central Florida 2025

Post by Kendra Kennedy

On behalf of the DevFest Central Florida team, it is our pleasure to announce the winners of the first ever DevFest Central Florida Hackathon! This year’s DevFest Hackathon was focused on empowering humans with AI and offered three different tracks by which to do so.

• The Software Prototype track was a traditional hackathon track where participants created a minimum viable product (MVP) over the course of a week to demo and present at the wrap-up event.
• The App Pitch event, was one where participants would come up with an idea for an app and present UI mock-ups and slide decks to pitch their idea for an app.
• And the final track, the Singularity Startup Pitch was a business pitch track in which the participants pitched their AI Singularity proof business models.

Throughout the course of this event, all our participants were able to learn and demonstrate a deep understanding of AI and ML industry trends, applications, and the impact that AI is having and will have on our communities, our world, and ourselves.

Now, join us in celebrating our winners!

The Singularity Startup Pitch

Participants were tasked with creating a business plan and product definition for Event Horizon Labs, a strong business concept that would leverage AI that surpasses human intelligence. The pitch needed to address the needed human guardrails, contain a clear business model, and prioritize humans.

First Place Winner:
NeighborMind - AI for Empathy & Local Impact

• The Project: The main product of the NeighborMind Singularity pitch is NeighborMind, a decentralized network of empathetic AI agent. “Neighbor Agents” listen to local needs and connect people to food, education, and support. Each Neighbor Agent listens to local signals — text, social media, resource updates — and connects people to food, education, jobs, or emotional support. Over time, these agents learn empathy by modeling human communication — tone, urgency, and emotional context. They don’t replace people. They connect them.

Why the Judges Loved It:

• The focus on community
• The potential for local and global partnerships

Second Place Winner:
The Promethean Network State

• The Project: The Promethean Network State pitch focused on maintaining humanity in advanced emergent intelligences by rewarding positive behaviors of models through a non-centralized network that generates behavioral tokens, and removing bad actors by leveraging the good actors and human judges that remained in the loop.

Why the Judges Loved it:

• Very forward thinking
• Provided a solution for social integration for emergent intelligence

The App Pitch

Participants were tasked with designing and concepting functionality for an app. The app needed to leverage AI in a way that impowered and enriched user’s lives.

First Place Winner:
Roasted

• The Project: Roasted is a financial tracking and planning app that leverages AI to track your spending patterns and habits to offer advice on ways you can improve your finances.

Why the Judges Loved It:

• The quips about poor spending choices from the chatbot, encourage better financial decision making without perceived judgement
• The design was thoroughly fleshed out and would make iteration on the app idea easy

Second Place Winner:
ComputeNet

• The Project: ComputeNet is a network of AI training nodes that allow for community democratization of AI training.

Why the Judges Loved it:

• Addressed issues of bias in current AI training models
• Allowed a way for everyone to be involved with and leverage the training of AI

The Software Prototype

Participants were tasked with developing a working MVP of a high-impact software app or game enabled by AI. The main focus was on creating a working prototype by the end of the sprint.

First Place Winner:
OnList

• The Project: OnList is an app that leverages AI to completely automate the listing process for second hand items. The app takes images of items and compares them to thousands of listing online to identify the item, generate an appropriate price, generate an appropriate description, and edit the image to provide a clear thumbnail for your item listing.

Why the Judges Loved It:

• Has a potential positive environmental impact by helping reduce waste
• Empowers people by making the listing process easier
• MVP was a complete product and ready for testing

Learn more at onlist.app/

Second Place Winner:
Echo

• The Project: Echo is a presentation generating web app that allows you to generate a presentation on any topic and stream that presentation live leveraging Vonage’s api. In addition to generating standard slide decks, Echo also allows you to create interactive elements to engage with your audience.

Why the Judges Loved it:

• Leveraged the Vonage api in a fun and interactive way
• MVP was fun and engaging
• With a little polish this MVP will be ready to ship

Third Place Winner:
FloodReadyAI

• The Project: FloodReadyAI is an app that uses AI to analyze open source state and federal data to create tailored safety solutions for hurricane season. This app allows users to input their address and get a comprehensive Flood Risk Analysis with risk factor break downs, nearby evacuation centers, potential sandbag distribution sites, emergency contact information, and recommended safety actions.

Why the Judges Loved it:

• Provided a human-first safety solution that could be used used locally or internationally
• Leveraged AI for human empowerment
• With improved designs, this mvp could be ready for the local market

Special Mentions

We also want to recognize the incredible work of our other participants:

• Singularity Special Mention:
  • “I am the Singularity” - A pitch focusing on how the Singularity, in a sense is already here
• Software Prototype Special Mentions:
  • “TurboCut” - An AI powered video editing app that corrects your mistakes and merges your best takes together
  • ”LuaPay” - A payment solution that leverages the uniqueness of the structure of human hands to create a secure form of payment
  • ”Talosopolis” - A learning solution that generates custom learning paths for students and teachers at every level of education
  • ”FuseMindAI” - An AI solution that merge responses from different AI models into one comprehensive response with minimized uncertainty

A Special Thank You!!!

This hackathon would not have been possible without the support of our incredible Organizers, dedicated Mentors, expert Judges, and generous Sponsors.

• Organizers:

  • Christi Kapp
  • Michael Rosario
  • Javier Carrion
  • Kendra Kennedy

• Judges:

  • Dwane Hemmings: Software Developer and Advocate at Vonage
  • Isabella Johnston: AI Ethics & Learning Thought Leader / Founder at E4CTech, Piv Consulting, and Cat 5 Studios
  • Kendra Kennedy: Software Engineer at Design Interactive

• Venues: Thank you to Innovate Orlando for hosting our in-person demo day and Seminole State for hosting our in-person DevFest Conference and Kick-off event!

• Sponsors: A massive thank you to all of our sponsors!

  • Seminole State College
  • Google
  • Vonage
  • BOT: Black Orlando Tech
  • E4C: Employers 4 Change
  • DataPsy, Inc.
  • Microsoft
  • Kodeco
  • JetBrains
  • OrlandoDevs
  • ONETUG: Orlando .NET User Group
  • Postman

Partners

Gold

Copper

Community Support

We hope to see you all at our next event! Stay tuned for more workshops, meetups, and hackathons by Joining us at https://gdg.community.dev/gdg-central-florida/.

Feel free to join our community on Discord at googledevscentralflorida.com