We have a last minute global sponsor, Carrefour, a French multinational retailer. It is the second largest hypermarket chain in the world, with 1600 hypermarkets. They operate in 30 countries, in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Carrefour means “crossroads” and “public square” in French.
Given TADHack is focused on telecom app development and most of the sponsors are technology providers in this category, its fair to ask why are they involved? Telecoms is now programmable, its available to anyone to use across their apps, services and businesses. Carrefour understand the power of this democratization and want to encourage developers to build on top of their data new experiences.
The goal of the challenge is to design and develop a prototype app for mobile or the web that improves consumer experience. To help you achieve this goal they put at your disposal thousands of tickets with anonymized information (https://github.com/ging/carrefour_basket_data_challenge). Create apps using the information provided and online sources like social media, geo-location, weather data, blogs, forums, and all kinds of websites to take our customer’s shopping experience to a new level. Develop shopping assistants, food specialist apps that count calories and help make healthier choices, find new applications to virtual reality, predict the clients next necessity or create something totally different.
When combined with telecom capabilities such as voice / messaging / micro-location / payments / identity / video / WebRTC and mashing up with bots / social media / Carrefour data, the potential is really exciting. You could use Telestax to create a simple voice app to check stock availability, or Matrix and a bot to create a Carrefour agent, or Tropo for a multi-language agent, or hSenid Mobile to enable you to order and pay for your shopping using USSD, or Voximplant or Project reThink to actually see what’s in the store “show me the sweet corn” and a drone flies over, the list goes on and on.
Check out the Carrefour Challenge, the prize on offer is 3000 Euro. The ease with which this global sponsor can be mashed up with all the other sponsors makes Carrefour a natural fit and demonstrates that TADHack is for Everyone.