What a busy December it has been! Let’s roll back a couple of weeks, to the first week of December, the the Slush week. In order to get the most out of the fact that all of Europe’s techies are arriving to Helsinki for Slush, not one but two massive hackathons were hosted during the same weekend. Proximi.io also wanted to get the most out of this opportunity and be present in both of them.
First we are going to cover Junction, a student hackathon that is part of Major League Hacking. It was hosted at the Old Harbour building, where an incredible 1300 participants fit nicely in. The hakacthon consisted of ten tracks hosted by giants enterprises from different fields, such as Supercell and Zalando.
Here’s a short film that capture the Junction experience in 2 minutes, filmed by Liisa Koivisto from Lapland University of Applied Sciences:
Proximi.io was present as a special partner, whose platform could be used in any of the main tracks. We were overwhelmed by the interest towards our tech and helped a dozen teams to get started with the Proximi.io platform and Estimote beacons. In total, six teams finished their projects and demoed in different tracks.
Team CityQuest working on their project
Here’s a quick walkthrough of the demoed projects:
FeedMe
What do you want to eat? Find your perfect place. Pay it easily
An app that shows you nearby restaurants that may interest you. At the restaurant, the app provides an easy way to pay the bill through the mobile, and store the bill there. Having the check on the phone makes it easy to check what each person ate and drank, and allows you to split the bill among friends. The app uses Proximi.io for outdoor and indoor positioning.
More: https://devpost.com/software/feedme-lm4i5v
Look For Me!
A virtual assistant for the blind!
An application that helps the blind to find their belongings indoors, at their own home or at another frequently visited location. The application combines together indoor positioning, image recognition and voice recognition. How it works:
1. The user takes a photo with the app of an object that they are leaving behind. It utilizes Google’s Cloud Vision API to recognize the object, and fetches the coordinates through Proximi.io platform. The information is saved in the backend.
2. The user can later on ask the app in speaking, where they left some item, for example “Where is my guitar?”. The app will tell them the answer in speech, giving them the instructions to the object, “In the Main Hall, about 10 meters left of you.”
More: https://devpost.com/software/junction2016-oxu41m
Team LookForMe! working on their product
K-Connect
Indoor navigation that optimize the shopping experience with least effort and maximum utilization of time
A shopping app for the Finnish hardware store K-rauta, that combines in-store navigation, item location search and advertising. It also includes some more creative aspects, such as gamification, kids’ safety and ability to find friends, who are also shopping at the same location. Built on top of Proximi.io positioning platform.
The hack won the retail track challenge Conversions: Supercharged by Kesko. Congratulations!
More: https://devpost.com/software/k-connect
Team K-Connect demoing their solution
Tarjous
Shopping made faster
Another shopping application for K-rauta’s challenge. The app allows for customers to search for particular items and see the fastest route to pick them app. A nice innovative touch is their plan to display all discounted items on the map as special advertising for them.
More: https://devpost.com/software/tarjous
Team Tarjous displaying their application
Speedtribe
Coolest location-based game ever, gamification of intelligent buildings, retail conversions, mobility and whatnot
Speedtribe is a fast-paced and location-based player vs. player game. It can be played indoors, and uniquely, only the opponent of the player is shown on the map. The game’s storyline is about a tribe of skilled demon-hunters hunting poor persons occupied by the resurrecting demons. The demon hunters are assigned an opponent by the server, and their goal is to get near the target as quietly as possible, and fire the weapon, when they are near enough. The trick is in surprising the enemy, when they are not paying attention, such as when they are looking at their phone.
More: https://devpost.com/software/speedtribe
Judging such a diverse set of hacks was not an easy task. We assigned each project a set of points based on criteria selected by us: the ability to solve a real-life problem, creativity, originality and functionality. As our partner Estimote was not able to attend physically, we selected a winner for their part as well.
And the winners are:
Estimote prize: Look For Me! A really cool hack solving a real-life problem for the blind community. It utilizes complex APIs (image recognition and voice recognition), and functioned well in real life. We really hope that the team keeps on working with the project in the future!
Proximi.io prize: Speedtribe. This team carried out an immense amount of work under one weekend, starting from developing a Unity plugin for the Proximi.io platform, developing the game logic, building the visuals.. Simply amazing job.
Congratulations to both winners, and many thanks to all teams, who gave a try to our platform and the beacons!
Proximi.io