Hoiio Developer Blog

In the last 10 days, developers worked together to create travel apps for THack 2012.

Hoiio is an API provider for the competition. So is Wego, a travel search portal.

As well as being API providers, Hoiio and Wego also jumped into the fun of hacking!

Myself and Choon Kee from Wego teamed up to create FareHound – an SMS application to monitor airfare prices.

You can SMS flight search such as “SIN to SFO on Dec 25 with $1000″ to +65 8537 2489 (up for a limited time only).

For Developers:

FareHound is fully open source on github. It uses Typesafe Stack (Scala + Akka + Play! web framework).

Last year, Hoiio API is one of the API providers for THack, a travel hackathon.

This year, the annual event is back to Singapore, with a change in the competition format. Instead of a 24-hour code-without-any-sleep hackathon, you now have around 8 days to create your travel app.

If you are developer, come and show what you’re made of in Singapore.

Perhaps another winner will find Hoiio API useful.

NUS Hackers organized Hack & Roll 2012 (a 24 hour hackthon from 19th Feb 1pm to 20th Feb 1pm) to encourage students to build apps that would benefit the NUS community. The Hoiio API team supported the event by offering a special signup for the participants so that they can use their free $10SGD credits without trial restrictions, i.e. they can use their credits to sms/call any number.

The following apps built during the hackathon made use of Hoiio API:

• Geek Rave by team N-Team is a web app that allows students to show off their projects and have other students “rave” about it. When someone raves about your project, you’ll get an SMS notification.
• Vigilance by Semantics3 is a mobile Android app that sends SMS alerts to parents when their child/ward is in a dangerous area.
• Cab 2gether by team GiveUsPlaybooks! is application for people who want to share cabs.

Additional coverage and results of the event can be found at e27.

Edit: added links to blog post by Semantics3

Over 48 hours, 20 teams participated in 48hacks, a national hackathon organized by NTU Ventures.

Hoiio took part, and I am proud to announce we have emerged Top 5!

We created Hoiio Wave, a device to keep drivers safe on the road. Here is an awesome 3min video showing how Hoiio Wave works.

In this hackathon, there are 2 requirements – developers have to use Arduino and Mindwave.

We added 1 more requirement for ourselves, that is to use our very own Hoiio APIs :) In the hack, call back API is used to make a call to the spouse of the driver, while IVR API is used for anyone to call a number and find out the driver’s current attention level.

This hack also demonstrated that our RESTful API can be programmed in any environment. For this hack, the Arduino WIFI host shield is the actual hardware calling our RESTful API.

In the last post, we pay compliment to the winning app from THack – Where-Is-My-Travelling-Parents

This post, we want to pay compliment to the app that the Hoiio Team created!

Yeah, we did not just provide API, but also participated in hacking an app.

In that 24-hr, Yew Meng and me created Guidebnb, an app that helps you find a local guide to travel with. This is an Airbnb for local guides! You can try out Guidebnb with your Facebook account right away, or read more for details.

 

How to use Guidebnb?

• Register using your Facebook account (we will auto set your city, gender, age)
• Enter your phone number (for travelers to reach you on your phone)
• Enter your preference as a traveler (what kind of tour guide you want to hook up with ?)
• Enter your preference as a local guide (what kind of traveler you want to hook up with ?)
• Save changes!
• When you travel to a city, for example Singapore, call this local number +6565918703, and press “1″ to connect to a random local guide!

Also helps you find nearby hotels

Three APIs were used

1. Facebook for social profile
2. Expedia for hotel search
3. Hoiio for SMS and IVR

2 weeks ago, we announced THack, a 24-hour travel hackathon to be held in Singapore. The hackathon concluded with Where-Is-My-Travelling-Parents emerging as the winner!

Where-Is-My-Travelling-Parents is an app that helps to notify family members on the whereabouts of a traveller. The idea is pretty awesome as there is NOTHING that the traveler, nor his family, needs to do. Look at the parties involved here.

The family members are notified automatically in these 2 ways:

• When the flight landed, they are notified. OAG API is used to track the live flight information.
• When the tour group reached a destination, the tour leader will “check in” by making a phone call, and this trigger the notification. This is made possible using Hoiio IVR API!

4 out of 6 apps used Hoiio API

We are also proud to say that Hoiio API has proved to be a very valuable API for the hackathon. Out of the 6 apps presented, 4 were using Hoiio API (there were 9 APIs to choose from)!

And the winning app fully make use of both our IVR and SMS capabilities.

“Simple to use” is one of the key reason why developers choose us.

THack, a hackathon organized by Tnooz, is an event where developers produce awesome travel apps in 24-hour.

Following a September hackathon held in Boston, the event now moves to its next city – Singapore! And it will be held in the luxury Shangri-La Sentosa Resort!

Hoiio API is proud to be one of the API providers for THack. This is together with a couple of travel APIs such as:

• Add to Trip
• Expedia Affiliate
• Abacus

If you are interested in hacking out a travel app, you can register here.

For developers who have registered, see ya on 16th Oct!