“Likeonomics”, music and road police: HAHAthon 4.0

The more ideas we share, the more we seem to produce. That’s what became apparent at the fourth HAHAthon that we’ve held last Friday. This time we’ve had some guests as well. Eugene, our friend, partner and a crack airsoft player, even pitched his idea. Alex, a senior developer from our partner company HQSoftware, was actively participating in the discussion.

Sound of Cloud

Dmitry (on the left), “Sound of Cloud” presentation

The first idea that we’ve discussed, was presented by Dmitry, an experienced frontend developer with BA background. His vision was deceptively simple: create an app that would allow him to listen to the music he’s got on his cloud storage. However, the implementation of this app caused a lot of discussion. Some people suggested making a web app which could integrate APIs from various cloud providers (Google, Microsoft, Mail.ru etc). Others thought that making a fork of existing desktop or mobile player would be better. Still others wanted just a browser plugin for Chrome or Opera.

The matter of IP rights has also caused no small amount of argument. If a person uploads pirated music to his cloud and plays it with our app, who will be committing a crime? And how to implement the system without breaking the law? Ultimately we’ve decided to do some research into the matter, because it could be seriously affecting the development process. And Dmitry has started to prepare a spec for the app.

Likeonomics

The second topic was presented by our guest, Eugene, who is interested in GameDev and has tons of ideas. He has submitted a concept of the new tool for social media managers.

Eugene, “Likeonomics” presentation

Let’s imagine a situation when you’ve found really nice pictures in the recesses of your computer and you would like to share them with the whole world. By “share photos with the world” of course, I mean “upload photos to the Instagram”.

Take Gramblr as an example. This application allows the user to upload pictures from computer to Instagram.

Oops, and there is a much bigger problem if your work includes editing hundreds of pictures daily.  Eugene suggested combining auto-posting (pending posting), multi-accounting and editor in one intuitive application.He thought through all the details, including monetization model. In addition to the monetary model, you can also buy app functionality with… likes!

The key difference is to release it on the mobile devices, so that person who manages all Instagram activity can work from anywhere,anytime.

There were lots of comments about what services should be included in this app, to avoid  the functional cluttering and many more jokes on scheduling posting selfies with a certain facial expression, like every Thursday it is “Grumpy day” or Instagram mania.

Road police

Traditionally, or it just turned out that way, the third topic was presented by Igor, Techspire CTO. Basis for our discussion – the statement of the Belarusian government, that in 2018 all people will have Biometric passports and ID-cards. And Igor’s proposal was to simplify people’s lives

Situation: Road police stops you for documents check and as a driver you know that you need to show technical certificate,driver’s license and insurance. So many documents to carry! Why not keep everything in one thing, which every modern man has – a smartphone. All the data can be put in the device (encrypted strongly, of course!). No more papers and document covers!

The whole company discussed how difficult it is to bring this idea to life, agree with the authorities and in the discussion, we went even as far as the features of the human mentality. That’s how deeply in Techspire we like to understand the topic.

In the end, nothing invigorates the mind quite like a live discussion with pizza and juice. So there is no reason why we will stop organizing those HAHAthons anytime soon. Expect more information about the progress of our apps and new projects we conceive on the HAHAthons.