Hackunamatata: The Results!

On the days leading up to the 28th/29th June we made a lot of noise about #hackunamatata. Our two hack-days have since passed and as the dust has settled, we’ve been left with some remarkably impressive projects.

On Monday morning we tied it all up with the project demonstrations, voting and the final results. For a bit of background, see the Life’s a pitch project pitches and then check out each of the resulting contenders:

Project Euro

Project Leader: Petra Studholme (PPC Manager)

Project Euro was all about a way to access your insurance policy details via mobile and sharing it with your customers. The team completely refactored the existing mobile website and added the ‘proof of policy’ option the site. On demo day Peter Vandenberk demoed the fully working site through an iPhone simulator, extremely impressive for a couple of days hacking!

Brainiac

Project Leader: Jennie Stone (Operations Analyst)

Straight off the mark Brainiac gets the vote for coolest yet geekiest project. In his pitch, CEO Jason Stockwood revealed an Emotiv wearable brainwave reading device. With a large force of developers, the team was able to create two working games over the two days.

The first was Angry Nerds, a basic clone of a popular mobile game in which the player has to launch a missile at a set of blocks using thoughts alone (the player has to think ‘left’ and ‘right’). On demo day to much entertainment of the audience, after three attempts, Chris Chamberlain succeeded in knocking over the set of blocks with the power of his mind!

The second game was Zombieber in which the player had to navigate a zombified pop star around a maze towards a brainiac brain using facial expressions alone. When you pull a facial expression, it results in a unique ‘signature’ of brain activity that the headset is able to decode. Again, this had hilarious results from Chris on demo day.

Project Buffy

Project Leader: Alastair Douglas (Head of Marketing)

Project Buffy is about using publicly available data intelligently to improve the way we price an insurance policy for customers and minimise the amount of work that the customer has to do in order to purchase the right policy. Using a variety of available API’s such as Google Places, Mapquest, and Streetview, the team created an ‘all in one place’ dashboard which could display information about the surrounding area of a property such as geographical data and crime rates.

Simply Addictive

Project Leader: Martin Sadler (Senior Developer)

Another game in our midst… Map Snap! A location-based game of Snap! using OpenStreetMap. Within the two days the game was up on Heroku and playable. We’re hoping to bring it to you in the near future!

Frantick

Project Leader: Jo Salter (BI Analyst)

Frantick is a purchase interception service (much like for example, Verified by Visa which requires that a user answers questions about a band before they can complete the purchase of live tickets for that band. The aim is to deter touts by making it more likely that fans of the band (and thus people who can easily answer the questions) get hold of the tickets first.

In the two days the team managed to put together a live website along with an active twitter account which amusingly was initially suspended for being a little too enthusiastic.

The guys in Frantick demoed their live site by acting as a user would if trying to purchase Foo Fighters tickets, running through some of the questions a fan would be asked.

Simply Services

Project Leaders: Arti Mathanda (QA Manager) & Shiyamala Selvaratnam (UX Design)

Simply Services is a great concept which allows any of our policy holders to connect with other policy holders looking for services provided by them. Work with businesses you can really trust!

Github Based Recruitment Tool

Project Leader: Ben Ashford (Senior Developer)

A solo project by Ben Ashford, identifying similar GitHub users based on the overlap between projects being watched by those users. Essentially an automated and smart way of tracking down suitable developers on Github within a given skillset or theme .

Wizard & Project Fei

Project Leader: Ying Fei Phoon (Front End Developer)

This project was originally a single project which aimed to take visual smoothness and simplicity such as in wantful.com and apply them to buying insurance on the web. By the end of the hackathon, the team had produced two different solutions, one for the front end and one for the question set.

The front-end part had the stylish idea of lighting up corresponding parts of a representative image when the customer chooses to include different covers in their quote.

For the back-end part, sub-team Lukas Oberhuber (CTO) created a cunning and vastly simplified question process in which questions would only be asked if they were relevant based on previous answers.

The Results

After all demos were complete, the projects were nominated against the following three categories:

• The peoples award (every team member could give votes for any project other than their own)
• Best Design – As voted by the senior management team
• Best Implementation – As voted by the senior management team

After all votes had been counted and the senior management team had made their final nominations the winning teams were:

The People’s Award

• Winning Team – Project Euro

Best Design

• Winning Team – Simply Addictive
• Runner up – Project Buffy

Best Implementation

• Winning Team – Project Buffy
• Runner Up – Ben Ashford’s Github Based Recruitment Tool

The winning team for each award each won a meal out as a team.

Throughout the hackdays we were very pleased to have Computer Weekly. Check out their great video of the event.

Check out our own event video too.