This year’s TADHack-mini Orlando brought another exciting hackathon in connection with Enterprise Connect 2019. As Flowroute’s fourth year sponsoring the event, we were excited to team with Alan Quayle, founder of TADHack, and the other event sponsors, to help increase developer access to telecom APIs and other communication resources.
The theme of this year’s event and resulting hacks was “social good.” Seven teams participated and were tasked with creating applications that would offer society improved safety resources.
We are proud to report six out of the seven participating teams utilized Flowroute’s solutions to integrate call routing or SMS/MMS messaging into their applications. And all four winning teams used Flowroute’s APIs – an event first. Denise Mauldin and Amy Meyers, engineers with Flowroute, traveled to Florida to facilitate the hackathon, support Alan, and work with the developer teams.
Among the impressive teams there were four innovative standouts: SaveMe, Water Watcher, CallNection and City Assistant. In less than 48 hours, these developers were able to create inspiring solutions and develop working prototypes with the potential to drive positive impact. These teams each won $250 from Flowroute, as well as other monetary prizes from other sponsors.
Below is an overview of the winning companies and their solutions.
- SaveMe is a secure video reporting app using WebRTC and SMS. The solution enables civilians to livestream and send video from their smartphone to a predetermined group of numbers. SaveMe’s app functionality locks during filming, providing individuals in distress with a real-time mechanism for “checking in” and reporting their location and surroundings to peers or loved ones. The SaveMe team won monetary prizes from Flowroute, TeleSign and VoIP Innovations.
- Water Watcher is a non-intrusive IoT home monitoring solution for individuals considered “at-risk” (i.e. elderly relatives living alone, kids home alone, etc.). By uploading water usage data to the cloud, Water Watcher can monitor for irregular patterns and send an alert to interested parties via Flowroute’s SMS/MMS API. Water Watcher’s solution has the power to improve safety for persons at risk, as well as monitor water usage on a sustainability level. Developer Jerry Reed won prizes from Flowroute and Telesign.
- CallNection received recognition from Flowroute, Telesign and VoIP Innovations for its unique take on increasing anonymous voice communications. The group’s 90’s throwback roulette of voice chatting sparked attention toward its desire to bring back human connection through calls.
- City Assistant is designed for travelers or individuals in areas where map accessibility is unavailable, or a user has limited data. By texting City Assistant, users can receive directions or language translations to help them navigate foreign areas. The app can even answer questions related to generic medication names available in the FDA database. City Assistant won awards from Flowroute, Telesign and VoIP Innovations.
After the event Flowroute had a chance to connect with Alan who shared, “We depend on local developer groups to promote and keep TADHack the great event that it is. Flowroute has been a longtime sponsor and set a record with six out of seven teams integrating its APIs. We were all impressed with Flowroute’s solutions.”
We love being a part of the TADHack-mini community and partnering with Alan. We are already looking forward to next year’s event and continuing to help developers drive their innovations forward through access to telecom resources. For more information about the event and how to get involved, check out Alan’s blog post, “TADHack Spotlight at Enterprise Connect 2019.”
Flowroute has an extensive offering of APIs to help developers integrate and manage call routing, calling and messaging. Flowroute’s API library contains SDKs for number management and messaging API services including Ruby, Python, .Net and Node.
