Ultrahack 2016 – Beer, digital displays and beacons were a winning combo

This year we had the pleasure to join the Ultrahack 2016 event. Ultrahack is a hackathon where computer programmers and other people involved in software development come together for a short period of time (in this case for a weekend) and do something cool.

We decided to join the tech challenge where the idea was to develop something awesome for Clear Channel’s digital displays which are equipped with Proximi.io beacons. These are displayes which can be seen in shopping centers, on streets or in different shops etc. Big and small.

As I have discussed earlier in this post, bluetooth beacons are simple devices which broadcast their identifier for example once a second. In this hack we implemented a few cases where we modify the basic advertisement content of the display when a Pint Please user comes close to it.

Our hack

The picture below demonstrates a case where I (as a Pint Please user) come close to the screen on a street or in a store. The screen will change to show a personal beer recommendation. We can also push more information about the beer to the user’s phone. The user could even interact with the screen via their phone.

Pint Please knows my beer taste and the recommendation is relevant to me and the beer is available nearby (in a pub called Maltainen Riekko just outside the Ultrahack venue).

OK, so I will go to Maltainen Riekko and have few beers. Then I’m ready to go home and I walk by a screen. We can personalize the content once again. Now Maltainen Riekko thanks me for visiting and offers easy instructions to get home. We used HSL reittiopas in this case but it could easily be modified to use any navigation service.

OK, the next morning I wake up and I might not feel all that fresh. I go out and walk past a digital screen. Now Pint Please knows about the beers I had yesterday evening. We can offer a recommendation on a good restaurant where I can get something good to eat.

At the Ultrahack we implemented support for Apple iBeacons and the proximi.io platform on Android and iOS. We also created the live web stream which is run in the cloud and provides the content for the screen. All the cases above are just functional demonstrations and may not be implemented to Pint Please as such.

All the entries in this challenge were judged and we were happy to win the first price (valued at 26 000€!).

Thanks Ultrahack 2016, Clear Channel and Proximi.io! It was a blast!