Uber, developers, designers, Lagos, cool ideas — all these came together at the Uber Developer Hackathon Lagos showcase earlier in July.
It’s the local reprise of the global Uber Request hackathon , a virtual hackathon on challengepost for third-party developers powered by Uber. Uber recently added the Request endpoint to its UBER API that launched last August. The access allows third party apps dispatch Uber cabs.
In Lagos
Uber partnered with TechCabal to draw up perks for Nigerian developers who entered for the competition and built solutions relevant to Lagos. Along with cash prizes and networking at the global hackathon, the top three Nigerian third party apps were up for a feature / interview on TechCabal, a feature on Uber’s global blog, an opportunity to pitch to the Uber engineering team, up to NGN50, 000 Uber credit and exclusive brainstorm with Nigerian tech masterminds; Google’s Emeka Afigbo, Etisalat Nigeria ‘s Head of Digital Media, Adia Sowho; iROKO Partners founder and CEO, Jason Njoku; Paga’s Tayo Oviosu and Pulse.ng’s Richard Tanksley. The masterminds doubled as judges for the event.
The Demo
Six developers/developer teams demoed on the day of the hackathon, and here are the best three based on cross assessment by the five masterminds.
First prize winner:
Executer: A Google Calendar Layer on Uber by the Andela Team, from Andela
Executer combines Google Calendar functionality with Uber’s Request endpoint to figure out a user’s itinerary and and request an Uber automatically in time for any scheduled event and movement.
Second prize winner:
BerSimpler by Femi Taiwo
SMS for Uber. BerSimpler lets users request a ride using SMS. The developer, Femi Taiwo is the co-founder of INITS, the Lagos-based software firm behind BambooSMS+, an app that let’s users backup SMSs, calls and contacts.
Third prize winner:
Beatraffik by Beatraffik
Beatraffik is a crowdsourced traffic reporting app with a native map. The team reworked the webapp and layered it on the Uber Request API to provide a more accurate representation of a route with contextual reports on traffic detours and security updates, thereby giving a more accurate ETA and fare estimates.
Prizes
1st Prize:
- An exclusive interview with TechCabal
- An exclusive feature on blog.uber.com
- Inclusion in the TechCabal announcement of Nigeria’s top three winning apps
- Opportunity to present the Uber Engineering team their winning idea
- Exclusive brainstorm sessions with the tech masterminds to help take their apps to the next level; Emeka Afigbo (Google), Adia Sowho – Etisalat Nigeria (Head of Digital Media), Jason Njoku – iROKO Partners, Tayo Oviosu – Paga and Richard Tanksley – Pulse.ng.
- N50,000 Uber Credits
2nd Prize:
- Inclusion in the TechCabal announcement of Nigeria’s top three winning apps
- An exclusive feature on blog.uber.com
- Opportunity to have a 1-1 with an Uber Engineer, discussing their app
- N25,000 Uber Credits
3rd Prize:
- Inclusion in the TechCabal announcement of Nigeria’s top three winning apps
- An exclusive feature on blog.uber.com
- N25,000 Uber Credits
Uber credits will be loaded directly to winners’ accounts, and the winners, Andela Team, will be connected to members of the Uber engineering team via Uber’s global head of Product Marketing, API and Developer Platform, Nathan Lam. This will be a video conference call that we will setup directly. The Andela Team will also be introduced to the five masterminds and can schedule a single one-hour meeting with each of them over the next month to advance their apps.
Photos via: Uber, Justin Egwudo
