MOO’s DroidconHack 2015 winners
MOO set the attendees of DroidconUK 2015 a challenge to work with our NFC-enabled Business Cards+ and explore the myriad of interaction possibilities that they bring to Android.
Kai wrote a great brief outlining our ideas around identity and data exchange, and it captures the direction we’re exploring as the combination of product & service matures.
All six teams did brilliantly in the time they had, and it was a lot of fun watching them demonstrate their hard work, even though some of it didn’t quite go to plan! Rehearsing what you want to say, and making sure you reboot your devices before taking to the stage are two vitally important lessons to learn.
There were two runner-up prizes, and they went to the teams behind Short Circuit and NFC Piano.
Short Circuit was a very promising exploration of a four player card game where each player is running the game app. Each turn players pick up a card and choose who to target according to that card’s effect, tapping it on the target’s phone.
Players had their life expressed as the percentage charge of a battery which was nicely animated on the phone screens, and cards could add to or remove from the battery charge, or cause other effects. As well as NFC, they also used the Nearby API to apply certain effects to everyone in the game.
We liked this because it was a robust implementation that was confidently demonstrated during the team presentations. The theme of identity was explored through the phones as much as the cards themselves, and we could easily see this potentially being worked up into a full commercial release.
Also a runner-up, NFC Piano from @AvelyneGoh was a huge surprise for us, and was exactly the kind of hack that stretches your thinking around what NFC can do. As the name suggests, the team put together a physical piano, complete with white and black “keys”, and you tapped each card with your phone to play.
The team gave a brilliant demonstration, and it gave everyone in the room a laugh when they described it as “not very easy to play”. Their creativity, playfulness and execution were a great example of why hackdays are so fascinating to organise and participate in.
The winning hack — CoffeeNFC
And so we come to the winning team comprised of @dnbitstudio, @dev4AndroidApp and @LukaszCzaplicki. Their project, CoffeeNFC, was a smart, cloud-backed loyalty card system for redeeming those all important free cups of coffee!
Given the time constraints of a hackday, their app was a great balance of visual economy against functionality, not only on the phone, but also in a basic set of cloud services. They gave a demo which was multi-user aware, and showed how data linked to the card was shared between two separate app installations using a networked data store.
They also spoke confidently of the many ideas they’d like to explore if they had more time to work on the project, all of which were a brilliant response to the brief we set out at the beginning.
For our very first participation in an event like this, the experience has been wonderful, and the team here are looking forward to engaging more with developers next year, both with more hackdays and with our upcoming developer API.
More on that soon…
