Label A hooks up with Pon and wins 1st place at HackaPON
Last December we started working with Porsche, our second project for Pon after a successful project last year with Greenwheels (iOS and Android). Our top-notch mobile and back-end team has been working on Porsche full force since then. Shortly after, we were invited to join the HackaPON.
Pon challenged the participants to solve the issue of mobility in and around big cities. Quite a challenge to do within 24 hours! Juan from Label A was the technical brain behind the winning team that crushed the competition.
The challenge
For people that are unfamiliar with the anguish called ‘Amsterdam traffic’, this is what it looks like:
As our cities are getting more and more crowded, a number of problems arise. The highways around the cities are jammed while the city itself gets polluted. Moving around in general is a problem, let alone finding a parking spot. Pon called out to their best partners to solve these issues. They asked Label A to fix the clotted cities through the power of technology.
We sent three of our developers to LAB111, where the HackaPON was held. Our developers teamed up with Pon’s best and worked out the smartest ideas to improve mobility in and around big cities.
Influencing travel behaviour
The winning team built an app that focuses on two main goals:
- Getting cars out of the city
- Filling up empty parking spaces
How do you get cars out of the city? By controlling when, how and whereto people are traveling. We can influence this by simply giving people incentives to don’t use their car to go to the city and by creating Parking Hubs on the outskirts of the city.
The most effective incentives are time and money. The app combines different sets of data to advise people different routes and/or different means of transportation that are either faster or cheaper.
To motivate users to follow the advise, the app rewards them with points. Car drivers can earn points by parking their car at a PonHub (not to be confused with something else) rather than in the city center. These points can be exchanged for a number of things, like free access to rental bikes that are spread throughout the city and are situated at the PonHubs.
Filling the gaps
The second goal is solving the parking issue. Many locals pay for a license that allows them to park in their street for free. Smart. But these licenses are not used 24/7. People have to work in the daytime and then these spots are empty (or change to the normal hourly rate for people without a license). So the team came up with a solution that encourages people to park in a more efficient way: why not let people share these licenses?
If person A needs a parking spot in Amsterdam while having a license in Rotterdam and person B vice versa, they might as well use each other’s spots! The app connects supply and demand and fills up the gaps, so that no spots remain unused while other spots are being fought for.
We came, we saw, we built, we conquered
In 24 hours this ideas was turned into a working app and it turned out to be the winning concept! This means a lot to us because we happen to work with two of Pon’s brands, one of which we only started working with two months ago. It shows to us that we, as a business, understand what the future of Pon looks like. And if we can achieve this in 24 hours with three people, we can only fantasize about what we could do in a couple of weeks or months with a dedicated team. The sky is the limit, but it’s often the businesses that are still a few steps behind.
The future: it’s all about context
We have a clear vision of the future. The amount of different devices per person is growing and the user’s focus is constantly shifting between these devices throughout the day, depending on the context. And this asks for a vastly different approach than ‘let’s make an app and send out notifications when we have something to say’. It has to be much, much smarter. It has to be relevant to the user, based on where they are, what they are doing, what time it is and what their goals are. We call it Contextual Experience. The concept we created for Pon is a a great example of a concept that is mainly based on context. We give the user relevant information (‘it’s faster or cheaper to…’) at the right moment (‘you’re about to leave your home, you might want to consider’) based on the user’s behaviour (‘I don’t want to be late or be stuck in traffic’) and the user’s goal (getting to the city ASAP). We don’t bother them when they don’t need us. We simply give them what they need, when they need it.
We challenge you to challenge us
We love getting involved in creating a smarter future. It’s what we thrive on. Do you think that you can hack a smarter future with your company? Try us and we will happily prove you right!
If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to give Bram Hilgersom a call at +31640286592 or visit our website.
