Junction´s 2016 edition counted more than 1300 developers, a 48h Hackathon, about 45 partners and tonnes of new app ideas. And guess who was there making an impression? EMBERS challenge winner was also considered Junction´s winner. From the 25th to the 27th of November, the EMBERS team went to Helsinki to support developers through a future mobility challenge in Europe’s largest hackathon. With a total of more than seven teams, the hackers that participated in the EMBERS challenge developed solutions around the theme of urban mobility using data from New York, Recife/Olinda and Valencia. The judging panel selected, as winners, three main projects: Suju, Park Time Analyser – Parkello and CarBuddy: P2P carsharing.
Suju is a project aiming at solving mobility issues by using Sohjoa to organise dynamic and cost effective custom transportation. This tool is directed to event organisers and public transportation decision makers allowing them to design dynamic routing for the self-driving buses. If the surroundings of a location are pre-scanned, the bus can plan and drive routes that are calculated on-the-go. This tool makes the required optimisations of the path choosing a smarter way to transport people considering their desired pick-up location. Parkello had implemented a mobile application (for Android operating system) that allow car drivers to trigger a parking event. These events are sent to a server (developed using the Ruby-on-Rails framework) and displayed in a Web application created with angularJS, which provides parking wardens with access to information about parking events and parking time control. One of the advantages of Parkello solution is the algorithm implemented as a service with the purpose of analysing the collected information and forecasting parking condition (based on parking events from Smart Parking Disc plus the EMBERS APIs).
CarBuddy, a sort of Airbnb for cars, addresses two main scenarios: Car owners can list their vehicle for a short-term rent by other CarBuddy users; and CarBuddy users can select / lock-unlock / drive and, finally, pay-as-you-drive using CarBuddy mobile app. Each rent starts and stops online on dedicated municipal parking bays, equipped with parking sensors. Instant checkout is performed via P2P money transfer system upon the rent end. Communication between car owners and renters is carried out using in-app messenger. All members of the three winning teams of the challenge took home a Parrot AR. Drone2.0 Power Edition Quadrocopter (first prize), a Sphero BB-8 (second prize) and an Earebel Unisex Stree Beanie Hat – with removable AKG headphones (third prize). Junction also selected Suju, the first prize winner of the EMBERS challenge as the best app of the whole Hackathon, awarding them with the grand prize of 20.000 euros. This was a great adventure for EMBERS being able to share but also put the APIs developed to the test.