Mashups catering for foodies and consumers happy to allow the wisdom of friends to decide on a trip were the winners of the THack @ SFO this week.
Teams from Flight With Friends and Amadeus won the latest Tnooz hackathon for teams with two developers or fewer and three developers or more respectively.
Concierge, the product from Flights With Friends, was a food-centric travel planning application which allowed users to select and review trip ideas based on where users might choose to eat in a destination.
The product used the GeckGo and Viator APIs made available to developers as part of THack, as well as content from Google Places ad Yelp.
Amadeus clinched the larger team prize with a product called TVote, a Facebook-driven application which allows group bookings to be organised and booked using a voting system from participants.
GeckoGo was once again one of the APIs used as part of the hack, alongside Vayant for air content and Amadeus’s own feed for hotels.
Highly commended for their efforts and creativity in each category:
Small team category: A way to add gamification to cruise bookings from Embark.at and an individual developer who spent just five hours creating a 3D model to examine flight search options using augmented reality on a mobile device.
Larger team category: Earn money from renting out a property (such as Airbnb) to finance a cruise trip (via CruiseWise) and a service from Flight Centre in Australia for planning and booking on a mobile.
More to follow…
Sponsors of THack @ SFO:
Related posts:
About Kevin May
Great job by Kevin & Gene for putting on the inaugural Silicon Valley THack. We’re looking forward to the next one.
Allan & the Embark team
Interesting. But – What one would like to see in technology is an ability to interpret results from various feeds, rather than simply present results from different feeds. This, of course, requires greater emphasis on the the input to the question and an improved ability to filter any results. The former aspect being more critical than the latter. It would also require any presentation (of results) to take a more proactive view of available options, so offering a more limited though more relevant set of results.
Tripadvisor tries to do this (for example) though is a victim of it’s own success to the extent that genuine results may be clouded by spurious reviews. Here, it may be relevant to return to the old fashioned Michelin guide style of premises evaluation. In this way, the client may be better assured of valid results most notably from the reliance and confidence placed in such people as the guides’ inspectors.
Symantics is trying to address this issue (I understand) though as far as I can see, this is still in its infancy. Even then, one may get a better range of client side information to work with but unless the results side is rock solid in its reviews and commentary, there is some doubt as to whether symantics will prove to be a panacea.
The ability to interpret any given information is a skill which still lies wholly within the premise of the travel agent. The ability to look at a range of flight options and evaluate one against the other in terms of cost, time for travel etc and to estimate which option represents best value rather than which one is cheapest (or, even may not be the most expensive) is something from which developers seem to shy away. Too much like hard work? Or is it simply easier to impress with fancy graphics and techno-wizardry?
This naturally begs the question: To what extent does one recognise and reward (travel) technology because it actually makes useful strides forward …. rather than simply rewarding because some of one’s travel technology peers says: “Ohhh! That looks clever”?
Techcrunch on Flights with friends: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/10/facebook-kayak-flights-with-friends-launches-to-take-the-pain-out-of-group-travel-planning/