Inside the Tampa Hyatt Regency Saturday morning, Daniel Melnick hovered over his laptop, attempting to create a text-message SMS system for HART bus riders, so as they wait at their stop they can dial in a number and learn how soon the next bus will be arriving.
Melnick was joined by three other members of his team participating in Tampa's first Hack-A-Thon, a contest to pitch, program and present a functioning Internet application in 48 hours.
Although there were approximately 75 people involved in the event this weekend, there were only about 20 or so working at 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning, as others were still asleep or just hadn't made it back inside the hotel's City Center Cafe and Patio, where plenty of coffee was brewing and Red Bull accessible. Meals were catered by downtown eateries Fresh and Bamboozle.
Such marathon coding competitions have busted out big in the past couple of years, for which companies — or in this case, the city of Tampa — provide crime statistics, real-time parking data, and other sources of information never before given out so that programmers can create new applications. For this hackathon, HART (Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority) also provided statistics, which allowed Melnick and his team to come up with a plan — with a hard deadline of 6 p.m. Sunday night, exactly 48 hours after it commenced.
Melnick, who works as a digital strategist at Spark Advertising in Tampa, said the idea of using a text messaging system instead of a smart phone app is that many HART riders do not have smartphones.
"It's just an easier way of doing things. And we're not spending resources. We're not telling HART you have to put GPS on your buses. This is a very simple way of doing that."
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.