JEDDAH — Tomorrow (Wednesday) Saudi Arabia will launch the largest hackathon in the Middle East to attract leading programmers from around the world to create innovative ideas to enrich and enhance the Haj experience.

The 36-hour hackathon is expected to attract 3,000 developers. It’s open to all tech entrepreneurs, innovators, developers and designers from all over the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Participants will have to find and build solutions to further streamline the process of Haj and improve the overall experience of pilgrims. The areas of focus are food & beverage, transportation, crowd control & traffic management, travel & accommodations arrangement, public health, waste management, housing, communications solutions, and financial solutions.

The hackathon offers prize awards to the top three participants valued at SR2,000,000 to transform their ideas into businesses.

In addition, SR150,000 will be awarded as a prize for excellence.

The winner will walk away with a prize of SR1,000,000 for 15% equity investment. Runner-up gets SR500,000 for 10% equity investment, and the 2nd runner-up will get SR350,000 for 7% equity investment.

Besides the top three prizes for equity and investments, there are other prizes to be won as well such as Google Home Mini devices and Google Cloud credits.

Submissions will be judged on four areas:

Design: Was the UX/UI intuitive and appealing?

Simplicity: Is the application simple to use and can the team explain it clearly in three sentences or less?

Creativity: How creative was the team in developing an innovative solution for the challenge?

Impact: Did the team create an application that can have a real and valuable impact?

Each judge will give a total score between 0 and 20 points.

The three-day Haj hackathon is being organized by the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones at the International Exhibition and Convention Center in Jeddah.