Winning Innovation: Meet the Team Behind 'Forward!', the Award-Winning Travel App from HackKosice

Recently, Artem Naumenko and Oleksandr Smahlii from our testing internship program participated in the prestigious HackKosice, the largest hackathon in Slovakia, where two hundred developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals from 27 countries were competing in their technical skills and creativity.

Their team called ?Lorem Ipsum“ won 2nd place overall and 1st place with an innovative cross-platform mobile application called "Forward!". Let's dive deeper into their journey and see how they overcame challenges to emerge as winners.

?It was 24 hours of active, exhausting work, a grand total of 32 hours spent at the event, and 4 rounds of presentations to build our way to the 1st place within the challenge we chose, and the 2nd place overall! It was a thrilling, rewarding experience and we'll never forget the rush of excitement that we felt while being announced.“

Introducing "Forward!": An Innovative Travel App Born from a Successful Hackathon

?After the tasks were announced, we quickly came to the agreement that the challenge presented by Scheidt & Bachmann was the most interesting, inspiring, and suitable for our team. The challenge itself was to build a cross-platform mobile application that would be a complete solution to the traveling needs of any user. It had to be able to differentiate as many preferences as possible, recommend the transport type based on the weather, and build the most efficient way from point A to point B without neglecting any intermediate stops or preferences.

We have used various technologies to fulfill all of these objectives and bring them to a whole new level, to create something new and unique. We've built the application using Flutter and Dart to ensure the app's stability, responsiveness, low technical requirements, and delivery on both Android and iOS based systems. The backend was written in Flask which contributed to it's simplicity. Natural language processing was one of the major innovative ideas we wanted to achieve. Users can write the preferences in whatever form they prefer, we use OpenAI to process the text and break it down to filters, preferences and additional stops on the way.

The major requirement and the main part of the application, though, remains the route building. This integral feature, as well as the discovery of significant places (parks, restaurants, shops, malls, stops, etc.), was implemented using the following Google Maps APIs: routesAPI (Google's next-gen route-building tool) and placesAPI. It allows building the most efficient routes between an infinite amount of stops, finding the places depending on a large amount of user's preferences. For example, a coffee with low prices, high rating, and a drive-in feature.

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"To accomplish such significant results within the 24-hour time limit, we relied heavily on our non-technical skills. The key to our success was being efficient, and we achieved this through collaboration, effective time and task management, and strong teamwork throughout the journey."

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From Hackathon to Launch: Will "Forward!", end up in your phone one day?

Finally, we ended up having a very solid and working solution, with all the core functionality needed and some basic design, naming, and monetization concepts to present. The application is called "Forward!" and now, when the hackathon is over, our team agreed that it would be an awful waste of potential to leave this application useless. The solution itself, and some other major ideas that we had no time to implement, are truly innovative. ?Forward!“ could end up being on your phone one day too because we plan on further developing the application, wrapping it in a beautiful modern design, and introducing features that cannot be found on any other existing application. Hackathon success gave us much more confidence to continue on. In other words: the project will live on!

Hackathons are amazing events that help people to demonstrate their skills, get an unforgettable experience, and simply have fun. It's like a huge programmers' party and a competition in one bottle. We cannot recommend attending these enough: to put your skills to the test, get new skills and experience, and probably even get some awards! But you could say that everyone participating is a winner of some kind, so it's always important to stay positive and enjoy the time spent! Lorem Ipsum members will most certainly do. Now, let us bow out, and thank you for reading!