Hackathon leboncoin @Vivatech2018
By Stan Amsellem (Frontend Developer)
The 2018 edition of VivaTech, a 3 year-old but already huge international technology event, was held in Paris early this June. Many booths from many tech companies (but not only) of all sizes were there to showcase their latest and craziest innovations.
This year, leboncoin decided to participate in a different way by partnering with TechCrunch & BeMyApp in the annual Paris hackathon at VivaTech. Along with Microsoft, IBM, Talan, andRenault, leboncoin challenged hackers with a simple statement of our own: imagine the marketplace of the future.
As Nadir Kadem , a frontend engineer at Datadog we invited to leboncoin to talk about hacking culture during Brown Bag Lunch, would put it, a definition of hacking could be:
Use something, change it, and make it do what you want with it.
That’s what people were invited to do.
The result is 22 teams of 2 to groups of 10 hackers of various backgrounds and nationalities (students, entrepreneurs, and employees from design, coding or marketing backgrounds) gathering to tackle this challenge for a non-stop 24 hours of brainstorming, coding, designing, and pitch training.
For the occasion, we created a single endpoint of an important section of our API, namely the search. Participants were given keys to access real but anonymized data that could be queried and sorted with many different filters, just like you would do when you search items on leboncoin.
But our goal was mostly to let people’s imagination lead them to unexpected ideas. And we were not disappointed. Here’s a sample of the hacks showcased during the final demos.
Winner from the leboncoin jury:
Pastis51 (Alaa El Boudali, Julien Berthomier) — an AI search for leboncoin
The concept as well the pitch were really straightforward: you take a picture of a product you like in the real life. You can add some product specification like color, size, price with your voice. Then, using an image recognition technology coupled with text-to-speech and the leboncoin search API, you just receive by SMS relevant search results of all the products on leboncoin that match your request.
Winner from the TechCrunch jury:
CommerceDNA (Mani Doraisamy, Boobesh Ramalingam) — post any new ad in 30 seconds
When you want to add a new item for sale on leboncoin, it’s known that the more details given about it, the more sellers will be interested by your ad. The problem is that it can take a lot of time to reference all the details of a product. CommerceDNA provides an “assist me” button when you post a new ad on leboncoin. If you click it, you just need to provide a picture of the product you want to sell, then CommerceDNA will recognize it, search online for any official description to fill out all the details on your ad for you. Then, it suggests the best pricing to apply after analyzing trends on your product category on leboncoin.
Challengers who retained our attention:
Lebonbrocker (Guillaume Seiler, Franck Brami, Lucas Verra, Yannis Achour, Nicolas Vrc, Jean-Michel Alandou): When you search for an item on leboncoin, it can be tedious to send the same message over and over to dozen of sellers, wait for some of them to reply, then to answer back to check if the deal seems good; rinse, repeat. Lebonbroker takes care of that process by automating the search and first contact phases, to select the best sellers for you. Then, the buyer only needs to contact a couple of the pre-selected sellers to make the deal and save a lot of time.
Le bon coin coin (Julien Blanc, Maxime Blanc, Anthony Pagès, Benjamin Lechiara, Jiangong Sun): It’s pretty hard to imagine how a table or a chair you find on leboncoin would fit in your home for example. Le bon coin coin solves this problem using augmented reality. The principle is simple: you select an item on leboncoin, and then you use le bon coin coin to visualize it in your living room through your camera and an augmented reality experience.
leboncoin locker (Pierre Antoine, Guillonneau Rudy, David Espic, Mi Chen, Jérôme Rastit): When you buy or sell products on leboncoin, it’s often not convenient to agree on a date, an hour and a meeting place to do the transaction. leboncoin locker solves this problem by enabling users to select a physical locker in an area. The seller then drops the item in the locker. After having paid on leboncoin online, leboncoin lockers generates a unique QR code for the buyer to be able to open it and take the product back home. If the item is defective, the buyer leaves it in the locker, and the seller also has a unique QR Code to open it and take it back home.
La braderie (Félix Becquart & Jiangong Sun): When you walk on the street, you might not be aware of it, but there are hundreds of items for sale on leboncoin nearby. La braderie aims at letting you open your smartphone camera and see through augmented reality some of the items that are currently on sale on leboncoin near you. You can select them and start to engage a conversation with the seller, and even meet him quickly.
leboncontrat (Joffrey Janiec, Pierre Milan, Ernest Marin, Jacques Douniol, Cyril Fermier): Sometimes you’re not sure if the seller is trustworthy or if a product you agreed to buy has any problems. Leboncontrat is a blockchain based network that enables users to create smart contracts where a seller and a buyer agree on the conditions for a transaction to be valid. If any of these conditions is not met, the contract is not valid, then the money goes back to the buyer and the product back to the seller.
Here are a couple of final thoughts on the first hackathon experiment outside of leboncoin.
First, as a technology company, it’s always good to be close the latest technologies, the ones that are still hard to scale but seem very promising like augmented reality or blockchain just to name a few. It’s also very interesting for a company like leboncoin which doesn’t have an open public API, to see for 24h what it would be like to be a platform with data and features that people could build around. On a more personal note, I am not working on the Search Team and not even using their endpoints for now — focusing right now on building the P2P online transaction experience at leboncoin with the Concretization Team (🔥 🍠) — , so digging into its API, learning how it works and trying to document it for coders to use was a new and very interesting exercise.
Secondly it’s also very inspiring to see what people can do when they’re trying to solve the challenges you’re trying to solve every day. It’s impressive to see how in a such short amount of time you can build amazing products with people who meet or collaborate for the first time. You see passion, commitment and creativity at their best. We’ve invited some of the winners to come to leboncoin to share ideas about the future of marketplaces.
A huge thank you to all the participants and big thumbs up to you for the demos and the crazy things you’ve made. Big thumbs up also to the great mentors and judges.
Kudos to the communication team at leboncoin who dared to make this happen and made everything a delight to everyone here. Thanks to the great teams at BeMyApp and TechCrunch who once again organized a great event for hackers of all sorts.
See you all next year!
