When you lock a bunch of creative people in a room for a day, it's difficult to predict what might come out at the end.
THack Barcelona was no exception.
In many ways the brief was wide open - address at least one of four challenges:
- mobile
- wearables
- multi-modal
- personalisation.
In others however, it was quite specific. The mobile challenge, for example, involved creating an application for travel in Barcelona or Catalunya - to dovetail nicely into the
Digital Tourism Innovation Campus, kicking off the next day.
The time constraint (about nine hours, rather than the usual 24-36) added pressure and forced the ten teams gathered to focus quickly in terms of devising and refining a concept, deciding which of the available APIs to use from TripAdvisor, eDreams and Vueling, as well as other non-travel specific APIs and creating the code for it.
Some had taken a look at the APIs when released earlier in November, came armed with an idea and then knuckled down to develop it.
Others had welcomed new faces to round out their teams, inevitably resulting in fresh ideas, the scrapping of some concepts and the formulation of new (and hopefully better) ones.
A further factor was deciding how to present the concept as a more or less finished product because equal weight was given by judges to the challenge, innnovation, presentation skills and technical merit of each hack.
It was interesting to note that most if not all projects were mobile in some form or other, most had a social media connection and most revolved around taking some of the pain from travel planning.
The time allocated to the hack was a factor in this as was the destination-focused mobile challenge.
And, conspicuous by its absence was the lack of any hacking for wearable devices although a number of developers were sporting the devices.
Drum roll
And so to the winners - divided into teams of one and two people, or three to five people, and pocketing Euro 1,000 per team.
Walking away with the smaller team prize was a team, dubbed the Powerpuff Girls (after the cartoon), which addressed the mobile and personalisation challenges.
The team took the eDreams B2B API for flights and combined it with Facebook Open Graph and an API from its workplace, hostel company St Christopher's Inns, to come up with a web app to help people create and manage an event on Facebook.
The judging panel, led by Tnooz CEO and co-founder Gene Quinn and including startup, investment and destination marketing experience, were impressed by the 'sellable and understandable' nature of the service.
Claiming the prize for larger teams was a group of developers from Busy Rooms calling itself RADU, short for rapid application development unit.
The team addressed mobile, multi-modal and personalisation challenges with its web-based app Around providing business and leisure travellers with customised tours drawing in recommendations from elsewhere on the web.
RADU used a collection of APIs including Google Places, Rome2Rio, Eventful and TripAdvisor to produce a responsive web app to help consumers explore their surroundings by generating a tour for them at the press of a button. The app also aimed to build in personalisation via Facebook likes.
RADU also walked away with the 'Best in Show' prize of Vueling tickets.
Judges felt a good team spirit was evident within RADU and agreed that although the user-interface was not 100%, it should be praised for addressing three of the four challenges. They also conceded that multi-modal is not easy to tackle from a technical point.
A final 'people's choice' award, carrying a prize of Euro 750, went to a team called the Crazy Pickles and its Tripper city itinerary repository to help people decide where to go and what to do without heavy planning or fear of being ripped off.
The web-based service, called Tripper, enables users to create their own routes or get suggestions from others and then share their trips to build up a rich bank of experiences.
What was a gruelling day for developers produced a bunch of interesting projects with ideas borrowed from startup's such as Tinder and data drawn in from many sources to create a rounded service.
Overall it was less about ground-breaking innovation and perhaps tapped more into the growing trend of simpler, single-purpose apps to help consumers with just a single element of a trip.