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almost 8 years ago

Resources to Help You Hack Your Ride

Hack My Ride 2.0 offers you $30,000 in prizes and a challenge: create technology with the potential to transform how we get around in Silicon Valley. VTA is asking you to build working apps and tools that will make it easier for people to plan trips, connect with their surroundings, and enrich their transportation experience.

This is a three-month online app challenge open to anyone in the world with a great idea and the talent to execute it.

If you missed our kickoff hackathon at The Tech Museum of Innovation on June 6, you also missed a great opportunity to learn about the data and resources VTA is providing to help you with your hacking. All of those resources are available at hackmyride2.challengepost.com/details/resources, and we’ll summarize them below.

Be sure to register at hackmyride2.challengepost.com today if you haven’t already so you’ll get updates about resources and other news. You can also form a team and learn about rules, prizes and the submission process on the site.

VTA Data

To qualify as a submission, your app must use some VTA data, which is listed at data.vta.org. Below are some of the most popular datasets and data feeds that you may find useful:

VTA Beacons

VTA will be testing beacons in selected areas of our system, and we’re asking Hack My Ride 2.0 participants to incorporate them into the app you design. You can qualify for a bonus $1,500 prize for the best use of beacons if you do!

Here are all the details you’ll need to access our beacons:

  • Documentation: docs.kontakt.io (Android SDK & iOS SDK)
  • API key: alYdUyIyKartZkGPsGapTAuWKZyIUUqa
  • A test deployment is planned at the Great Mall Transit Center, and we’ll let you know as that moves forward
  • Questions? Email us at social@vta.org
 Car Share/Bikeshare/On-demand Rideshare APIs

If you’d like to incorporate some other transportation options that your target users might find useful, below are some of the APIs you may want to consider. If you know of another API we should consider including, please email your suggestion to social [at] vta.org.

Hackathon Presentation

 Hack My Ride 2.0 Kickoff Hackathon Presentation from SCVTA

Our sponsors Microsoft Silicon Valley and Knight Foundation are offering $30,000 in prizes in eight prize categories, so there are plenty of opportunities for your app to win. Or submit several times, if you have a bunch of great app ideas and can’t pick just one!

Learn more about the challenge, including rules, prizes and the submission process, at hackmyride2.challengepost.com. Share the link on Meetup, Twitter, Reddit or wherever you connect with your fellow transportation hackers!

First-Ever User Experiences

We want you to go beyond basic transit trip planners. There are already many apps out there that help people plan their trips. We want to see innovative user experiences that haven't been tried before.

Think beacons, wearables, mashing up VTA data with other non-transit data, games, virtual reality, brilliant data visualizations and astounding first-ever user experiences.

You'll need to incorporate VTA data into your app so this will help VTA customers in Silicon Valley. But we want you to think even bigger and build something that could help people get around anywhere. Submit something VTA customers could use in other cities they visit.

We particularly encourage you to use the beacon technology we'll begin testing during Hack My Ride—Hack My Ride 2.0 participants will be the first to get access to this technology. Beacons have applications for wayfinding, location-based communications, accessibility for visually impaired people, loyalty programs and games that enhance the transit and mobility experience.

Large organizations can compete to win a recognition-only prize as a way to get some visibility behind your technology.

See the full rules and requirements at hackmyride2.challengepost.com/rules.

What will you create?