Posts Tagged ‘tinkerstorm’

Posted

Tue Aug 24 2010, 6:18pm

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

Press

Tagged

Tropo is Easy!

Chris Mattieu writes: “Reflecting on the event, I wanted to share an interesting observation that I had during the course of the contest. The winners of the iPad, Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, were not originally in the contest. They were hanging out with us at the event working on their totally awesome side project called GeoLoqi. Halfway through the event, Aaron looks in my direction and says that he is interested in integrating Tropo SMS with GeoLoqi. Several minutes later his iPhone buzzes with an SMS and he looks at me and Amber and says, “It worked! GeoLoqi just me an SMS notification triggered by my location!” This was certainly very exciting for all of us but it the event gets more interesting…

Amber and Aaron left to get some sleep and came back in the morning for breakfast with an idea to enter the contest. Their idea was ChatterCast, a mashup of Tropo, Socrata’s data.seattle.gov, Instamapper, and GeoLoqi services. Basically ChatterCast subscribes your phone to real-time 911 call data provided by http://data.seattle.gov. ChatterCast alerts you based on your location of 911 events happening around you.

This is a great example of how someone with an idea can not only win a contest only after getting started in the final hours but how anyone with an idea can change the world. Tropo’s ease of use makes it super easy to communicate with telephones via voice and SMS or even IM and Twitter with a couple of lines a code. There’s no reason not to add telephone support to your existing web applications to make them even more powerful in this mobile and social age we live in today.”

Read the full article on blog.tropo.com

Posted

Sun Aug 22 2010, 11:23pm

By caseorganic

Categories

Events

Tagged

Geoloqi-Powered ChatterCast Wins Seattle Open Government Hackathon!

This weekend we participated in the Gnomedex10 Open Government 24 hour Hackathon. Tropo sponsored a lounge at the Edgewater hotel with food, coffee, wifi and couches for open data geeks to build apps in. Participants were encouraged to make the best app using the Tropo API and data.seattle.gov (powered by Socrata).

We quickly realized that we could use the Geoloqi API to build a local emergency alerter app that could run on almost any platform. In the span of around 5 hours (plus about 4 hours getting the Geoloqi API ready), we built ChatterCast, a app allowing one to subscribe to XML feeds based on one’s location. We used the Geonote methods of the Geoloqi API to handle delivering the location-specific messages. Geoloqi used Tropo to deliver SMS messages to the phone.

We finished with just enough time to present before we had to catch our train back to Portland. We had to leave before we were able to see many of the other presenters. We caught about half of a great presentation by Portland geohackers and open gov enthusiasts Reid Beels and Max Ogden. Their app notified users the day before events happened in user-specified ‘watch zones’, e.g. road closures on your commute. They won for best use of Tropo, another success for Portland’s open government community!

Note that the app is simply a proof of concept. While it fully works, it requires installing Instamapper on your mobile phone. Instamapper runs on most mobile phones, including some older Motorola models such as the Boost Mobile phone. This means that even some users with older phones can still have access to this data with ChatterCast. If you’re unfamiliar with Instamapper, we wrote a post on it here.

Here’s an example Geonote SMS message from the data.seattle.gov 911 call dataset.

We had a great time building this app! Now we have a framework for digital storytelling and geolocal data. Anyone can use Tropo, Instamapper and the Geoloqi API to build their own app capable of pushing XML data to a user by SMS. We’ll be integrating ChatterCast into the Geoloqi API so that the mashup can be more accessible to developers and end users.

Thanks again to Tropo, Socrata, data.seattle.gov, Gnomedex and all of the great open data hackers at the #tinkerstorm hackathon event!

For more about Geoloqi, and to sign up to beta test, see Geoloqi.com. If you’d like to contribute as a developer, check out the Developer Wiki. To use the rapidly developing API, try the Geoloqi API!