Tropo and GeoLoqi would like to thank all of the participants in the yesterday’s 8 hour open government hackathon!  At 8:30 AM, approximately 25 code warriors converged on NedSpace, a Portland co-working space, for a full day of social hacking and a mission to change the world.  The goal was to find local government data available through either CivicApps.org, run by Rick Nixon and the city of Portland, or PDX API, run by  Max Ogden – master opengov hacker, and integrate it into an application that used either Tropo’s cloud communications API or GeoLoqi’s geo API (or both).

City officials, Rick Nixon and Skip Newberry, were on hand to inspire the teams and help judge the winners!  Judging was difficult because all of the applications were very impressive but but a couple stood out of the crowd based on idea, product features, and utilization of APIs.

Winner of the Tropo Sonos Media System:

Simon Walter-Hansen won Tropo’s Sonos media system prize for his creative use of our SMS and Voice API with his Heritage Tree Quest game!  Portland residents and visitors can interact with Heritage trees around the state using Tropo’s SMS or Voice with speech recognition.  As you locate tagged trees you can interact with them scoring points for each find and trivia question answered!

The participants dubbed this application PacMac for horticulturists!

Winner of the GeoLoqi iPad:

Reid Beels won GeoLoqi’s iPad prize for his creative use of geo location service API! “Don’t Eat That!” pulls health inspections from the county’s web page via screen scraping techniques. Using GeoLoqi’s mobile app, users receive SMS messages (via Tropo) to notify them of restaurants with scores under a certain threshold within 100 meters of their current location. SMS messages look like, “What ho! You might not want to eat at Backspace, their last inspection score was 93!” The rest is up to you whether you want to run away or sneak in for a closer look at the dirty restaurants near you! Don’t Eat That will also post links to the reports as tips on Foursquare!

Notable Runners Up:

Julie Baumler developed a cool Twitter application using Tropo’s Twitter API to engage people looking for pets to adopt through Multnomah County Animal Services database and petfinder.com.  Status updates are can be tweeted on the pet’s behalf or users can receive status updates with pets are available that match their search results.

A few of the folks from Cel.ly joined us notably Pierce and Daniel.  Their application, BarBird , tracks tweets coming from bar’s twitter accounts.  While the application wasn’t finished, they intend to push these messages to your cell phone via Tropo’s SMS API when you get within range of the bar using GeoLoqi’s geo location API.

We would like to thank everyone again especially Amber Case and Aaron Parecki of GeoLoqi for such a fun time and world changing experience!  We’ll leave you with a few other photos!  Be sure to catch our next event as they are a bunch of fun!