TakeFlight is a Ruby on Rails 3.2 web application developed for the NYUAD Hackathon 2013 in Abu Dhabi, from February 22-24, 2013. The application won first prize out of sixteen teams at the event. Takeflight was developed by Team Hashtag Wizard, consisting of Seth Thompson (Yale Univ), Alex Qin (NYU), Omar Omran (Lebanese American University) and Geoffrey Litt (Yale Univ), with mentorship from Ramsey Nasser (Eyebeam) and Max Stoller (Lerer Ventures). The team also developed a native iOS application to participate in video chats on the service.

TakeFlight connects young students in the Arab region with mentors (both abroad and in Arab countries) who share their interests and can help them with professional development. The site then provides easy scheduling of short video conferences which take place on the site, including collaborative document editing. When a meeting is set up between two users who do not speak a common language, users on the site who speak both languages are prompted to translate the meeting, and the site provides a three-way video chat with a translator.

TakeFlight uses the OpenTok API for audio/video chat, Facebook Connect for user authentication, and Heroku for hosting. An alpha version is available at this link. It is in an incomplete "hackathon" state, so please use at your own risk.