BlueVia supported the first ever Guardian (H)activate hack weekend which was produced by Rewired state. Along with our partners Nokia we were really pleased to be involved and my expectations before the event were blown away by the quality of ideas and the execution of them over the weekend.

The weekend involved about 80 of the best developers I have voluntarily giving up their whole weekend to “develop for good”.

People from BlueVia and Nokia both did short presentations at the start of Saturday about why we were at the event and setting out the prizes on offer to the teams of hackers. To be honest I was expecting a negative response to two “old” mobile companies offering up technology, if necessary, for projects over the weekend. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In the first hour of development the BlueVia team was overwhelmed by questions of how the APIs worked. The main interest was in the use of SMS and location APIs. A number of teams managed to integrate BlueVia services into their weekend projects and others realised that either the tech or the business model were not appropriate for their app ideas.

It was great to be deeply involved in the projects and to see first-hand uses of BlueVia tech. I also got insights into where we can improve the platform as well.

As you can see from the projects below all participants are keen to move the ideas forward and to deliver some tech to the wider world that could make a difference. BlueVia along with Nokia and The Guardian are determined to take a few of these apps forward to full implementation with continued support.

In summary a fantastic weekend although I could have done without the SodaStream hangover!

A few of my personal favourite projects from the weekend:

Safe Trip

This winner of the overall event prize was recognised by judges as a unique idea and a great use of technology to solve an everyday worldwide problem. The idea is that many people who set off from their home country as a migrant worker are falsely promised safe carriage by human traffickers. This is a highly risky undertaking, often things go wrong and migrants are exploited by the traffickers. This application combines a website accessed by the migrant in their home country and SMS API’s that can be accessed while their journey is in progress. The user enters some personal information via the web before they set off on their journey, including instructions on what and to whom to communicate information in the case of the event of something going wrong. The user is given a secret phrase to remember and the system then monitors for incoming information containing the secret phrase. Users can text into the service from any device in any country to alert the system to either a safe arrival “all ok” message or an emergency message. A timer can also alert a monitoring charity if no information is received after a certain time.

The safe trip team have come up with a great idea that can be really taking forward through Activate on Wednesday, I for one am interested to see how the idea is presented by the team (@godawful @HeyChinaski @ccharlesworth).

Next steps: Engage with a charity expert in Human Trafficking and work out how short codes could be easily provided across many mobile operators.

SMS Mapper

I think this was the best use of BlueVia across the whole weekend. Martyn Inglis created a service that builds on the Ushahidi.com idea of crowd sourced data collection during a crisis. The competition panel gave this a prize for best Crisis App. The idea behind SMS Mapper is a combination of SMS and mobile-operator driven Location based services (LBS) where the location of a mobile phone is calculated by the cell towers the phone is connected to. Martyn combined the BlueVia SMS API for receiving messages from users with the BlueVia Location API. When a user sends a text message to SMS Mapper the application requests the user’s location. The information within the SMS such as “Escaped panther spotted in Hyde Park” can be plotted on a map such as Google earth. [BlueVia note – the location API is currently available in the UK but we plan to roll it out across a range of Latin American countries such as Chile, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.]

Next steps: add the MMS API to the service so that users could upload photo or video also.

Scan Campaign

A simple but powerful implementation of 2 technologies. Often QR codes result in a URL being launched. This idea won the BlueVia developer prize, which was a Parrot AR Drone.

Often the best ideas are not revolutionary just a slight adjustment or coming together of existing ideas and this is exactly what Tim Green (@tfgg2) has done with Scan Campaign. He combined QR codes with SMS API’s (specifically BlueVia because the short code is free for the developer to set up).

This service allows campaigners to easily add QR codes to campaigns and polls but the scanning of the QR code results in the sending of an SMS instead of launching a browser. This has benefits for the campaigning organisation:

1. The ability to easily and quickly understand public opinion on a topic.
2. Mobile contact details for the respondent
3. Potential revenue from the SMS messages sent

Next steps: finish the website to demo how this service could be used by campaigners, and investigate other uses of QR to SMS.

Read a couple of other good write-ups from the weekend at Rewired State, Guardian and one of the attendees Ben Matthews.