Another city, another travel hackathon - with a team from Flight Centre creating a mobile service to help travellers on the road and another team helping festival goers organise their trip.
The Flight Centre team (Tom Kyte, Dan Shaw and Rob Gott) built an iPhone application using what they called a "scenario-based results" algorithm to give leisure travellers a better way to manage and enjoy their trip.
Using APIs from Rome2Rio, Viator and TourWrist, NowWhat gives a user suggestions of what to do on a journey based on the weather (it's raining - do something indoors, etc) and other variables.
The service also uses feeds from Google Places, Travellr and Panoramio to populate the app with content and help with functionality and other tools.
A particular helpful and clever element is the real-time accessibility to content on the app, allowing users to organise and change a trip on-the-go.
The judges (Martin Kelly of TravelTrends, entrepreneur Mark Pesce and Ian Cumming of TravelMassive) said:
"This is a brilliant application, solved a problem and was a clear winner. The scenario algorithm is an excellent idea and gave the overall service the edge over the other entries.
"Not only did it work very well, pulling results in easily from other sources, but it has a solid and easy-to-use UEX.
"A sensible and helpful product - great work."
The winning team for two or fewer members created a service called TheFestWay.
The hack came together in less than 24 hours and was headed by Rome2Rio's co-founder Michael Cameron with Kevin Lippy, a resident of Fishburners in Sydney and founder of Brokepacker.
The tool allowed users to search for new festivals and cultural events in Australia and plot their journey from point-to-point. The hack used both the Rome2Rio and Australian Tourism Data Warehouse APIs, as well as Google Maps.
The judges said:
"TheFestWay is doing some something different and focussing on a specialist area of the travel sector - festivals and cultural events - which could appeal to both Australians and overseas visitors.
"The inspiration element at a search level was well executed and a creative idea. We also admired how the hack could be plugged in easily into existing services or travel providers."
Other participants in THack Sydney included two teams from Amadeus, local travel technology company Tramada, TripCommon in the US and a stealth startup from Toronto.
For the first time at a THack, entries were asked to solve one of four problems.
NB:Pictures from the THack Sydney week (Facebook fan page)
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