Archived: Ticketmaster and TfL Hack Day

It was great to be part of London Tech Week through the excellent Hack Day on Friday June 16, put together by the teams at Ticketmaster and Transport for London. With over 600 apps powered by our data in the market place, I always look forward to these events as it allows me to raise awareness of TfL’s open data approach providing the opportunity for organisations and individuals to develop their own creative solutions.

This has helped to form new businesses, create jobs and launch new customer-facing travel products, giving customers more choice on their devices. A great part of this process is that this type of event is open to everyone at no cost, so we saw students, corporate professionals, freelancers, academics and participants from other sectors.


Creativity, innovation and energy šŸ’«

It always staggers me that a few strangers (in some cases) with different specialisms get together in the morning, and by the evening they develop a fully working prototype (or more) based on a strong concept that could potentially fill a gap in the market. This event saw six teams focusing on active travel, managing crowding, pre-planning journeys, community engagement and highlighting opportunities to increase revenue. All of the ideas and concepts were produced to an incredibly high standard, utilising TfL’s and/or Ticketmaster’s APIs.

The Hack Day took place at Ticketmaster’s London HQ with the teams building customer-facing travel products

Technical expertise šŸ’»

Building on the above point, the Hack Day saw some brilliant individuals including user experience specialists, researchers, developers, technical architects, testers and marketing specialists working together. It was encouraging to see the diversity in the room, with people from a wide range of backgrounds being part of the day.

 

The winning team, Gig Roulette, impressed with their version of the ‘secret hotel’ concept.

Feedback šŸ—£

As part of TfL’s investment in open data, I’m always interested to hear about what we could do better, whether it’s enhanced data or greater access to insights or documentation. With our developer team, lead by Abdul Q on the day, we got some really good feedback and thoughts to take away. Please feel free to continue this debate on the tech forum

I would like to congratulate all of the teams on the day, with a special mention to Gig Roulette who were the winners based on their creativity, feasibility of the idea and the excellent prototype that was produced in less than nine hours!