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Russia Team Wins PayPal Battle Hack Competition

The winners of the PayPal Battle Hack world finals. Facebook

A team of four Russian mobile application developers took top prize in the PayPal Battle Hack world finals in San Jose, California, winning $100,000.

Bairam Annakov, Oksana Tretyakova, Sergei Pronin and Alexander Balaban took home the check on Sunday for developing the DonateNow application that allows users to make charity donations.

The Russian team competed against programmers from Berlin, Washington, London, New York, Tel Aviv, Seattle, Barcelona, Miami and Austin, and had 24 hours to come up with and develop a completely new service that would incorporate the PayPal Beacon payment system.

The team said they would continue developing the new application and re-invest some of the money into their company Empatika, known for the development of another mobile application called App in the Air.

Two months ago the team took won the national stage of the PayPal's hackathon hosted by the Digital October Center on Sept. 7 and 8.

Tel-Aviv's and Miami's teams took the second and third places for developing the RunPal and LoanPal applications, respectively.

PayPal's hackathon is a non-stop event for programmers, designers and entrepreneurs interested in developing Internet applications that help to solve the problems facing big cities.

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