hacktrain case study v1
TRANSCRIPT
HackTrain was Europe’s first ever hackathon to take place in trains. In a mere 48 hours, 40 of Europe’s top designers, coders, product managers, hackers and entrepreneurs travelled the UK to innovate the rail industry as never before.
What is a hackathon? Hackathons are endurance events which challenge small teams to intensively build products they could never have conceived before. Teams of programmers, designers and entrepreneurs come together in a weekend to build products from scratch to innovate on a specific theme, or industry. During HackTrain; 40 entrepreneurs, designers and programmers were presented challenges faced by leading rail businesses. Over the 48 hour weekend, these teams designed and built mobile app, software and hardware startup businesses to tackle these challenges at the very heart of the rail industry - improving customer satisfaction, tackling pain points and fundamentally changing the travel experience for the better. Crucial to the tech industry; with the Facebook Like button and other features having been created in hackathons, other corporate industries have taken to using the model to facilitate and deliver the unparralleled innovation the format entails.
EUROPE’S FIRST HACKATHON ON RAILS
MARCH 27th-29th 2015 | LONDON - SHEFFIELD - YORK - EDINBURGH
Innovating the rail industry Hacktrain was defined by its mission statement: to enhance customer experience, and change and innovate the rail industry forever. Exciting partners are important for an exciting hackathon, and our sponsors made this mission even more achievable through their support, deep expertise and technology.
BLOOMBERG LP made available their Open API, allowing for real-time global data whilst also providing 2 technology experts for the whole journey
THETRAINLINE.COM provided 1 expert mentors & 2 participants for the journey with rail industry and tech knowledge, finessing and advising the products of the teams
ACCENTURE provided 1 technical participant for the hackathon and also advised us on our marketing strategy
NETWORK RAIL released their Data Feeds, allowing for access to data from the entire UK rail network in real-time
NATIONAL RAIL ENQUIRIES released their Darwin API, allowing for invaluable real-time and historical rail data across the UK, underpinning much of the teams’ strategy
VIRGIN TRAINS EAST COAST, EAST MIDLANDS TRAINS both provided first class carriages for our travel in between destinations for a luxurious trip
THE NATIONAL RAIL MUSEUM gave us the perfect venue for the the event
NOMAD DIGITAL ensured a smooth WiFi experience for major parts of our trip.
Attracting Europe’s top talent The quality of talent at HackTrain was unprecedented. Our organisers manage some of European’s largest hackathon communities, including HackaGlobal, which drove over 300 applications from all across Europe. We interviewed and selected 22 developers, 9 designers and 9 entrepreneurs to provide the event with a balance of skills. Participants included data scientists, machine learning experts, mergers & acquisition specialists and UI/UX professionals. Our talent were encouraged to develop solutions that focused on improving passengers’ experience across all aspects of their journey.
Travelling the length of the UK at 200km/h Hacktrain was not just another event with programmers in a single room. In just 48 hours, we travelled over 632 miles between 4 of the UK’s tech hubs. Friday 1700hrs, at the Digital Catapult Centre, hackers, partners, media, rail and technology leaders met to launch the event. As part of their partnership, sponsors challenged the attendees to find solutions to their issues.
THETRAINLINE.COM wanted to see creative use of location based technology to improve customer experience
VIRGIN TRAINS EAST COAST, EAST MIDLANDS TRAINS wanted to improve collection and implementation of customer feedback to better passenger experience
ATOC, BLOOMBERG, NETWORK RAIL wanted to see exciting use of their respective APIs and data feeds
Our partners presented alongside our organising committee, media partners and speakers, including Paul Papadimitriou, before sending us on our way to Sheffield. 2200hrs we arrived at the Electricworks in Sheffield, where every participant pitched their ideas to improve rail travel through technology. 10 product teams were formed from the 10 most popular pitches, as voted by the participants. Saturday 0800hrs, we arrived at the National Rail Museum in York - surrounded by the gleaming engines of rail history, the teams began work on their projects. 2000hrs we departed to hack through the night at Edinburgh’s Product Forge. Sunday 1200hrs we arrived back at the National Rail Museum in York to put the final touches to our work. On the trains to York, many teams conducted real-life customer validation, testing their products and conducting market research with real customers on the trains. 1600hrs it was time to present our work and for our panel of rail experts to pick three winners, as well as present the grand prize. HackTrain’s winning products A panel of partners and rail industry experts gathered at the National Rail Museum to pick the top products, and an overall winner. Which products truly improved customer experience? What single product stood above the rest in design and commercial value? Judges were Dave Slocombe, Mobile Product Owner at TheTrainLine.com; Samad Masood, Open Innovation Lead at Accenture; Jonathan Burrows, Managing Director at Ask4; Jayne Moyses, Head of Sales & Customer Service at East Midlands Trains and Paul Williams, Head of Research and Development at Bloomberg LP.
THIRD PLACE - CAPTIVATE
captivateportal.com
Our partners Nomad Digital highlighted the difficulties in providing a good WiFi service to passengers. Captivate built a new ‘Train Cloud’ technology packed with movies, TV shows, games and apps to entertain - and captivate - users during train journeys to access without an internet connection. Whilst trialling the product on our last train to York, over 50 passengers from the train organically logged on to the network and accessed content, lending further credence to the proposition. Verdict: a product with unique back-end technology and an exciting commercial proposition.
SECOND PLACE - ELASTICAPP
elasticapp.uk
Based on conversations at the launch event with executives at National Rail Enquiries, the team built an app to solve the problem of intra-station navigation. The app calculates the fastest route to your next platform based on your train and delivers a hyperlapse video of the fastest route. Their business model would include directing users to retail outlets in the station, if time permitted during their changeover. Verdict: an app with a beautiful user interface, creatively solving a problem directly outlined by industry leaders.
FIRST PLACE - REROO
reroo.co.uk Travelling long distances is expensive, and the Reroo team identified this pain point for students and others. Reroo allows users to find the perfect balance between ticket price and journey length by calculating alternative routes for travellers. Verdict: An extremely elegantly designed app with a deeply valuable offering for a core rail audience clinched victory for the ReRoo team. Exposure and impact HackTrain generated significant interested from industry and the general public. Media exposure included feature pieces on TechCityNews, TechWrap1, and pieces on our partner sites, reaching over 50,000 readers in total2. Social Media exposure included a competition run by TheTrainLine.com to generate ideas for features for their app on the hashtag #TLHackTrain reached over 29,000 users, generating over 129,000 impressions. Our hashtag #HackTheRails reached over 700,000 Twitter users, generating over 2 million impressions3. The official HackTrain Facebook page reached over 12,000 users, generating over 25,000 impressions with an 8% engagement rate.4
Continuing momentum – Post Event Engagement One of HackTrain’s key differentiators was an acute focus on keeping the event alive, many weeks after the hackathon weekend. We did this by steadily releasing pictures of the event through Facebook tagging each participant and also by announcing a post-Hackathon event. On Wednesday 15th April, the teams will meet with sponsors, other attendees and key rail industry leaders to network and explore commercial possibilities for their products. The exact outcomes for this event remain to be seen, but already there have been valuable commercial conversations between our teams, ranging from corporate product innovation to fully-fledged partnerships.
1 Tech City News (http://goo.gl/VHV1Es), TechWrap (http://goo.gl/m8qYel) 2 Virgin Trains East Coast (http://goo.gl/ZWyL0K), Bloomberg LP http://goo.gl/eG0ugh, Nomad Digital (http://goo.gl/Nd3YL8) 3 Data estimated using Keyhole (keyhole.co). View the coverage at goo.gl/Ao05jO. 4 Data taken from Facebook Insights, available on request.
HackTrain was much more than just 48 hours of train travel and energy drinks. It was an finely balanced assembly of world-class attendees, a serious mission, exciting venues and fully engaged partners - leading to an explosion of innovation and opportunity which will continue to return value and inspire for weeks and months to come. Our next goal is to launch the world’s first Rail Innovation Accelerator connecting startup companies who are building new technologies with the rail industry. If you would like to learn more about this please contact River & Emma. Contacts
River Taimoor Baig Project Manager [email protected]
Alejandro Saucedo Technical Lead [email protected]
Kostadin Kolev Operations Lead [email protected]
Sally Kuok Marketing Lead [email protected]
Ed Maclean Media Lead [email protected]
Emma Chesire Rail Accelerator [email protected]
Thank You To All Our Amazing Sponsors!
Travel Sponsors
Media Partners Team Summaries Captivate:
Guarantees safe, secure and fast access to quality content anywhere on your journey. Captivate secured a trial with a train partner to test the solution on a real journey. The content they used was copyright free games and movie trailers for the Edinburgh to York journey. www.captivateportal.com Jeevan Khaira [email protected] Jamie Woodruff [email protected] Mahdi Shariff [email protected] Jennifer Arcuri [email protected] Sina Shin [email protected] Vinicius Diascanio
Donna Alert: A smart train alerts system with intelligent incident impact forecasting designed to take the pain away from train delays. Campbell Unsworth [email protected] Tobias Rijken [email protected] Charles Cai [email protected] Jacopo Marcantonio [email protected]
Ubi Ubi allows for on click instant booking using for your most visited destinations. We also pre-emptively purchase advanced tickets based on your travel habits. Sina Shin [email protected] Mahdi Shariff [email protected]
Bogie Our mobile app uses seat booking information and motion sensors (ibeacons) to let travellers who are about to get on a train know which seats will be free in which carriage. This prevents carriage congestion and allows last-minute travellers to finally have some control. Eva Barabas [email protected] Anthony Thomas [email protected] Ajay Akkineni [email protected]
Reroo: ReRoo finds you cheaper, faster and convenient alternative train routes. It does this by re-routing through other stations and combines multiple tickets into a single purchase. ReRoo gives you the “sweet spot” between the cheapest route and the fastest route, depending on your preferences. Haider Khokar [email protected] Ulrich Boulon [email protected] George McDonnel [email protected] Thomas Edwards [email protected]
Spon-train-eous: This service brings people who want an adventure to towns people don’t visit on train seats people otherwise wouldn’t use. It even suggests local businesses and attractions to try whilst you’re there! Kate Rushton [email protected] Felicity Harer [email protected] Rob Finean [email protected] Kaushik Chaubal [email protected] ElasticApp An indoor visual navigation system which uses hyperlapsed video imagery to tell travellers where they are and how to get where they want to be. www.elasticapp.co.uk Joseph Mambwe [email protected] Ron Danenberg [email protected] Reeve Yew [email protected] Teck Loy Low [email protected]