By Katja Alaja

The City of Helsinki awarded three innovative apps under development at the Ultrahack 2015 programming event in November.

Helsinki was one of the main partners of the Ultrahack programming marathon in November. The partnership was a good way for Helsinki to speed up the development of new digital services. Helsinki is internationally known as a city that has published a great deal of open data for free use by anybody, including various statistics, economic data and maps. The data is available through the HRI service at hri.fi.

“We mobilized a good number of coding and design teams with the help of this major event and its Smart City competition. We marketed the event internationally and selected the best candidates for Ultrahack to develop their apps,” says project manager Joonas Pekkanen, who develops digital services in Forum Virium and for the City of Helsinki resident cooperation team.

The atmosphere in Ultrahack’s 48-hour marathon was intense to say the least.

“There was plenty of food, music and advisers who helped us to develop our app. We worked day and night, getting only three hours of sleep at night,” says Christopher Pilgrim of the team Cook with a Local. The team consisting of Danish students took third prize in the Smart City competition.

The idea of Cook with a Local is simple: people can use the app to announce cooking events that anybody can join for a fee, and those wishing to attend can use the app to register. A mobile version of the app should be ready next year.

“This is the Airbnb of cooking,” Pilgrim says. “It allows users to meet new people over cooking and to earn some money.” He adds that the app, which is still under development, already lists events in Helsinki, and he encourages people in Helsinki to join.

An up-to-the-minute guide to Helsinki

First prize in the competition went to Routes Helsinki, which serves both residents and visitors – as does Cook with a Local. The app can already be used by anybody to draw up a tour of their chosen Helsinki attractions on the internet. A mobile version will be published next year.

“We wanted to include Helsinki in the service because this is such a neat city. There are so many events here,” says Andreas Bollestad Pedersen, a Norwegian who has lived in Helsinki.

The Routes Helsinki team spent a great deal of time at Ultrahack to design the app and to develop its user experience.

Bollestad Pedersen explains, “The service will also provide a map for those touring Helsinki attractions, and they can get information on events taking place on the route.”

Photo Routes Helsinki team

Notices to move cars on smart phones

Second prize went to No Tow, which represents Finnish know-how. It is an app that sends notices to move cars parked on streets to smart phones. It was designed by a team of students from the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. The app serves both Helsinki residents and the City of Helsinki. It utilizes open data from the City of Helsinki Public Works Department. The goal is to reduce the number of cars towed by the Public Works Department by 20,000 per year, reducing car towing costs to the city.

“Users download the app to their smart phones and select the areas on a map where they usually park their cars,” explains Joosua Danson. “When cars have to be moved away from one of those areas for street cleaning or some other reason, the app users receive a notice on their smart phones.”

Danson and the other team members used a great deal of time to develop the app at Ultrahack. Now the work continues with the Public Works Department. The mobile version will be published in early 2016.

“The app has to be so easy to use that it doesn’t take any time to learn,” Danson says.

Ultrahack was one of a series of hackathons organized over the weekend preceding the major Slush conference for startups and investors.

Read more:
ultrahack.org 
cookwithalocal.net
routes.guide

Translated by Johanna Lemola

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