Mondo Hackathon 2
"What's my Mondo balance ?"
Simon Vans-Collina was sitting right behind us. "What's the weather like ?" he said, to a squat black cylinder on his desk. "The weather is SHIT" came the reply...synthesised by his macbook air. "What's my Mondo balance ?" - "The balance of your Mondo account is...."
This was the most audible of 12 dazzling hack projects put together by a hugely talented group of developers on a rainy 14th-15th November in Shoreditch. We were at Mondo HQ to take part in their second Hackathon - a weekend of creativity building apps using their remarkable API.
Mondo is a new kind of bank. You get a card. Mondo supplies an app which instantly notifies your mobile device when you make a payment. Not only that, they also enrich the transaction you see instantly on your phone with all kinds of data about the merchant and location. In the app you can add notes, photographs of receipts, tags, categories - you name it - to the transaction. You can view your balance against time in a slick chart which adjusts as you page through your payments history. You can view a budget breakdown which uses the transaction categories to visualise your spending habit. They give you the capability to immediately freeze your card, then unfreeze it again - blocking it instantly via the app in case you lose it.
But even more importantly, the API allows third party developers to conjure up incredibly useful tools & widgets and attach them to the Mondo account - which makes virtually anything possible.
Our Hack - iClip
Richard Owen and I decided to build an app which allows a user to instantly and electronically redeem discount coupons based on the transaction circumstances. We named it iClip.
So for example you could redeem a coupon getting you 50p off a coffee at Starbucks, when paying for the goods with your Mondo card. Redemption is instant and automatic, you don't need the app open to do it, and it does not require any modification to the POS - just an agreement between the card issuer and the retailer, and a bit of data & code. The Mondo cardholder can then download iClip and securely authorise it to use their Mondo transaction feed (as you might authorise Strava to access your Twitter or Facebook feed).
We split the work, with Rich working chiefly on implementing the integration of iClip's back-end server with Mondo's API and the data sources, and me concentrating on the mobile app and implementing our own API between the phone and our server.
We elected to implement the server using our own Infraxis IQS Cloud collaborative testing application - it provided everything we needed to quickly prototype and test our integration with Mondo - from the code driving the application, to the data sources holding the coupon library and coupon wallet. We could both work simultaneously on our tasks on the same environment with the web collaboration feature of IQS, and quickly publish and test our enhancements as we went along.
We spent a fair bit of our time pair programming - if you haven't tried that you should.
it's alive !
And here it is. On the left is iClip's coupon browse view, with the data feed generating the coupons in the app being served up from IQS Cloud, and on the right is Mondo's own app - and you can see the transactions we made during our testing followed up by notifications of redeemed coupons. Our server application received an instant alert of the authorised transaction from Mondo, and processed applicable coupons in the accountholder's wallet in realtime. Notifications were sent to the phone upon authorisation of the transaction, giving the cardholder immediate feedback that the transaction had been completed and the coupon had been applied.
If we had more time to continue this hack, we'd implement a couple more features:
- Online coupon issuing - issue a coupon after a certain number of transactions / amount spent with a retailer has been achieved
- Annotate the transaction in the Mondo app with the coupon image shown in our screenshot instead of pushing a feed item - it gives a clearer overview than spamming the feed with notifications
I'll follow this up soon with more technical details on how we implemented the phone app and our back end server application.
Richard and I would like to thank all of the Mondo team for their fantastic support during the weekend - both technical and nutritional - and for inviting us to participate in their live alpha.