On Saturday 27th October, teams from universities, user groups and companies (including a team from Esendex) gathered for a 24 hour coding session at the magnificent MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry).
We offered four shiny Nexus 7 tablets as prizes for the team making the best and most ingenious use of our API.
It was a hard fought contest and we saw many great uses of our API, but there could only be one winner … a team from 7digital – a leading digital media delivery company. They created an online application that allows you to organise football games between you and your friends using text messages.
Here’s what they had to say for themselves…
Esendex: What made you decide to tackle the Esendex challenge?
7digital: It was a combination of the opportunity to create a product, with an interesting API and the prizes. The push service sold the API to us – we knew that we’d be able to have more innovative ideas if we could respond via SMS.
Esendex: What would your elevator pitch for your hack be?
7digital: Manchester is the home of football in the UK – football museum, 64 English football league clubs – most notably aspiring semi-pro clubs and fan owned clubs like FC United. Organising a 5-a-side practise session, or a friendly kickabout with some people after work still isn’t easy – you don’t necessarily see the rest of your usual team during the week and they all prefer to be contacted in different ways. What if you could arrange a match on a website, and the potential players could easily reply via text?
Esendex: You found time to add quite a few features such as reminders, 3D pitch visualisation, man of the match voting and even grab some sleep. Where else would you have taken it with more time?
7digital: A “snooze” for the reminder, a drop down to alter the formation from 4-4-2 on the pitch, the ability to assign teams and also remove the current limitations of only having each mobile number in one game at a time and only one login – authentication always gets built last.
Esendex: What does an event like Hack Manchester mean to you as Developers? And as a company?
7digital: As developers it’s a good social occasion – we often talk about code down the pub so we might as well be doing it too. As a company it was a great showcase for us – it works on all fronts as we have a consumer site, business to business solution and a need to expand our recruitment. Although we might not get enquiries directly, when someone mentions the company name they will associate us with events like this which is a plus point for most developers.
Esendex: Any final thoughts on the challenge or event?
7digital: I’d like to thank the Esendex team for their help during the event – we didn’t need much but they were happy to get involved as soon as we did. The prizes too were an excellent idea – mine has already replaced my phone, Kindle and notebook for my various daily personas.
Take a look at the 7digital football application – it would be great to hear what you think.
