PLDT and its wireless unit Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) extended their support to Impact Hackathon, which was held Oct. 30-31 at Smart Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City and 14 other locations all over the Philippines, including Baguio, Cebu, and Davao.

The event was an official attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the highest number of hackathon participants, bringing together more than 10,000 innovators, mentors, and judges, simultaneously for two days.

The Guinness World Record holder is the Hajj Hackathon, a coding event in Saudi Arabia that ran from July 31 to Aug. 3, 2018, and had 2,950 participants. Impact Hackathon aimed to break the said record, with more than 4,000 participants coding from Smart Araneta Coliseum alone.

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The Impact Hackathon coding teams created technology-based solutions anchored on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, focusing on global issues such as climate change, education, agriculture, smart cities, and health.

Impact Hackathon was supported by PLDT Innolab, an incubator for startups and developer communities that want to scale extensible partnerships, and Smart Developer Network (Smart DevNet), a program that promotes technopreneurship and fosters a vibrant developer community in the Philippines through tech events.

Leading the event was Impact Hub Manila, an organization offering access to incubation programs, corporate innovation workshops, flexible workspaces, and a vibrant learning community for entrepreneurs across the Philippines and beyond.

The Impact Hub global community has about 17,000 members from 100 hubs in more than 50 countries around the world. Its headquarters is in Vienna, Austria.

The hackathon is part of Impact 2050, a multi-year program designed to create entrepreneurial solutions that can solve challenges within the agriculture, education, environment, and tourism sectors, among other areas specified in the SDGs.