As an avid reader of AnthillOnline’s articles, you’ll naturally remember that we wrote about the SAPI / Pollenizer “Hackathon” that was held in Sydney in March.
The event co-hosts, the Sensis software company and the Pollenizer business incubator, put technical experts and entrepreneurs in the same room, and added cash prizes to spark off a range of ideas and creations.
Sensis also to provided the Sensis Application Programming Interface (SAPI), a software toolkit that event participants used to access a customer information database as part of their apps.
Pollenizer provided a business brains trust to evaluate and possibly sponsor the commercial potential of the apps and ideas from the event entrants.
Who got the prizes for new phone apps?
So who won? The jury’s overall vote went to Eric Bae and his Locationally.
This goal of this app is to support business planning efforts for startups or small businesses undergoing expansion. The app helps them to understand where they should open, where their target customers are and where the competition is active.
Locationally took the $10,000 Pollenizer investment prize.
The $5,000 Best Commercial Concept prize went to DateNyt, an app to help people figure out itineraries for dates they want to impress.
The joint winners were announced for the $5,000 Best Product Execution Prize. Yellow Fridge is an app for aggregating scores for overall “what’s best” ratings on the Internet. BarHop! is an app for bar owners to entice more customers to come to their establishments.
What is the blueprint of a successful app creation?
What did it take for the overall winner, Locationally, to triumph over the thirteen other teams and mobile app creations?
This is how Eric Bae’s five-point blueprint for success looked:
- Eric describes himself as an avid developer and hacker
- He already had an idea for the app he wanted to create at the SAPI/Pollenizer Hackathon
- The first of the two days was given over to building a basic prototype to get early feedback from mentors
- During the week between the first and the second day, he spent between four and five hours building the minimum viable product (a key concept in successful innovation) to show to friends for further feedback.
- He also spent a further couple of hours emailing or discussing his idea on the phone to assess the level of commercial viability
In short, rapid prototyping and constant feedback on the business viability of the app, were two important characteristics of the Locationally week-long effort of creation.
Will it succeed? The success of Locationally will be measured by the number of test installations achieved, the volume of app downloads and, of course, the revenue it generates. Bae, Pollenizer and Sensis are watching closely.
Meanwhile, future hopefuls for winning SAPI/Pollenizer prizes have the rest of the year to think about their projects, before the next edition of the event in 2013.
Get thinking Anthillians!
