ExpediaEAN were proud to be one of the headline sponsors for the Tnooz tHack London 2012 – part of the global tHack 2012 series which also has events planned in Silicon Valley and Singapore.
The objective of the hack day series is to bring together talented developers, and open travel API’s in an effort to stimulate some creativity, in a competitive environment where individuals or teams compete to develop the best idea for a new product or service using a combination of the available API’s and any other freely available ones (the programmable web curate a great list if you’re interested in that sort of thing).
Yesterday saw the announcement of the winners of the London leg of the 2012 competitions, taking place at the Soho Hotel in central London. Teams descended on the event from as far afield as the USA and Tel Aviv, to see the other finalists presentations and hear the judges feedback.
Without further ado, the winning hack submitted was a simply fantastic concept which if it has been seen in the wild before, has certainly escaped me! The idea is straightforward, but one that many people face on a weekly or monthly basis: ”I’ve got 2+ people in different cities that need to have a meeting (or holiday for that matter), how can I find the best places that everyone can get to, keep the prices down, and arrange flights that work for all group parties?”
Well, to answer that question allow me to introduce you to the winner: TripCommon.com (currently in closed beta) which does exactly that!
What seems like a fiendishly simple concept, but as we know only too well can be a horribly complex problem has been solved in this easy to use site. All you do is input which cities the people are starting from and the web app works the rest out for you!
Ideas like this are a great example of how the web is revolutionising almost every part of our lives – and how quickly these new concepts can be turned into reality given modern programming tools and API access from data providers such as Expedia. Application development can be as easy as point and click now, so the only limit to the possibilities is your imagination, not your funding!
If you are interested in taking part in other of the other tNooz hack days, get in touch with tNooz!
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Martin is Inbound Marketing Director at Expedia EAN. In his career he has executed organic campaigns in industries from Gambling to Entertainment before moving to Travel. He is a regular speaker at conferences worldwide about inbound marketing, and regular writer and contributor to respected publications on the topic.
