Last weekend the Glia Engineering team hosted our first public hackathon. Developers competed by bringing their skills, passion, and grit to the realm of customer experience. At Glia, we are well aware that CX is fertile ground for applying developer ingenuity. Our hackathon was a great way to share with and learn from the local development community.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Glia developers began an “engagement campaign” of our own. We wrote blog posts geared towards coders with various ways our APIs could be used. We set up a Slack channel with hackathon participants to discuss ideas, technology, and generally get pumped for the event.
When the day finally arrived, participants were prepped and ready to code. Over the course of 24hrs participants got very familiar with Glia APIs, enjoyed some great food (and of course energy drinks), and got down to business exploring the frontiers of digital CX.
There were a bunch of great projects. Here were our winners:
3rd Place – StudyMove
CoBrowsing is a powerful collaborative tool. This team demonstrated a great use case (and product) by incorporating Glia CoBrowsing into a programming education tool. When students get stuck with a challenging algorithm exercise, they can call in a remote teacher to help them work out the problem. CoBrowsing becomes co-coding!
2nd Place- Kekify
Team Kekify built a great personal shopping Android app on top of the Glia platform. If shoppers are struggling to decide which product to buy, a knowledgeable operator is only a click away.
1st Place- AlexaMove
Alexa, the digital personal assistant from Amazon, is taking the consumer AI world by storm. Through devices like Echo, you can use voice interaction to start streaming music, check the weather, or add to your shopping list. This team saw the potential for customers to engage with a company through the comfort of a voice controlled device. The team added an Alexa skill to query list of online operators on a Glia enabled site, and start a phone engagement with a selected operator. The team behind AlexaMove won the grand prize – tickets to TopConf. We were so impressed by this hack, we sent the team home with brand new Echos of their own.
Honorable Mention – SMS Engagement
SMS is still ubiquitous and a simple way for customers to communicate with businesses. This team built a prototype conversation channel for visitors to communicate via SMS with Glia operators. The hack was done with Twilio’s SMS platform.
Even our CTO, Carlos, got in on the fun. Between mentoring teams on using Glia APIs, Carlos built a quick hack allowing users of Facebook chat to engage with operators on the Glia platform.
Hackathons are a great way to explore new uses of technology. The Glia platform offers tremendous possibilities, and we want to thank the hackathon participants for exploring those with us!
