Warsaw Editors Lab Prototype Becomes Product
An app prototyped at the Gazeta Wyborcza Editors Lab in Poland and launched at the App Store and Google Play Store shortly after made big strides in the midst of the 2015 Polish presidential election.
Designed by a team of three Polish innovators, App of Cards highlights the internet buzz around the elections, showing how the hype correlates with the polls. Paweł Luty, Tomasz Hajduk and Piotr Wróblewski received a special mention for their app at the hackdays in Warsaw in March 2015. Here, @PawelLuty tells @GENinnovate how “Team Brief” got together to see their idea through from prototype to product:
First of all, can you tell us how you came together as a hack team?
Well, it was all a question of luck and fortuity. I was trying to gather a team for the Editor’s Lab hackathon beacuse at my company we don’t have an in-house developers nor graphic designers. So I’ve wrote an Facebook post, made some calls and so I’ve gathered the team. Tomek, the developer, works for Kinetise.com and Piotr for mobile marketing agency We Like CAPS. We’ve met for the first time at the hackathon and it worked out.
Your app is called App of Cards — what does it do?
Putting it short, App of Cards is a tool that is made for visualising elections by presenting polls and electoral outcome, providing buzz monitoring and editorial analysis.
Where did you see the need for this type of application?
While analysing the election campaigns, the media is not talking enough about hard data. The media provides nice charts that show results of the polls; we know how many votes each candidate received, we know the turnout. And that’s it. Journalists and experts analysing election campaigns examine only discourse. They speculate how the candidate’s behavior or statements may affect the polls. They show no hard data, however. With App of Cards, we want and we can show how the buzz on the internet correlates with the outcome of the election.
You developed the app during the hackdays in Poland in March as a team of three. Can you describe the experience of the Editors Lab?
It was great. We had a great flow and we worked really hard to make App of Cards happen. When you’re locked in a room for 48 hours focusing only on one app, you can really do magic. And we’ve done it. We’ve made a full functioning prototype thanks to this great tool, Kinetise. I hope we’ll be able to take part in next year’s edition of Editor’s Lab and win this time and go to the GEN Summit! Our current success has awakened our ambitions.
What inspired you to see it through?
We made a promise that we’ll make it happen and I always try to meet my obligations. So, we did it. Tomek and Piotr did a phenomenal work and in just a couple of weeks we’ve managed to build a fully functioning backend, mainly based on Brand24’s API. Guys from Brand24 also made a great job and their support is just simply the best in the world. And of course their monitoring tool is fantastic. Frontend was mostly build through Editor’s Lab so we’ve only smoothed things up a bit.
Is it a free app or purchasable app? Where can people find it?
It’s free. You can downolad it from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. Or just get it via this link — https://www.kinetise.com/theappofcards.
What’s the next step for App of Cards?
At the moment, we’re mainly focusing on editorial side of the app. We simply do what journalists have to do — write analytical articles and commentaries about the elections. But we want to focus, not just on presidential elections in Poland, but also on the upcoming parliamentary elections in the autumn. That’s the whole point of the app — apply it to any kind of elections.
Originally published at www.globaleditorsnetwork.org on 13 May 2015
