For the first time at TADHack we had a sponsor outside the telecoms industry, Carrefour, a French multinational retailer. They are 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 wanted to encourage developers to build on top of their data new experiences.

The goal of the Carrefour 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.

Over one weekend 24 inspiring hacks were created using Carrefour data from around the world. It is amazing to see the diversity of the ideas, its great value for the sponsor. The mash-ups of Carrefour data with the other sponsors’ capabilities was very powerful. We list the hacks focused on Carrefour below. Its well work spending the time reviewing not just the winners, but all the impressive ideas. Well done to everyone who built on Carrefour.

The winner of Carrfour Prize was SmartWeb by Adrian Velásquez, Andres Muñoz Arcentales, and Andreina Montoya. Improve customer experience with recommender and SMS payment and backend pattern change detection. Which used Carrefour data and was mashed-up with Telestax.

Other winners that used Carrefour included:

Grocery Go by Bill Boyd, Sachi Shirasake, Ofra Orz, and Rennell Garrett, who won the TADHack Chicago location prize. Carrefour’s Augmented Reality and Telestax Customer Shopping Experience. Mashing up Carrefour and Telestax.

Athos by Luis Tonicha and Tiago Dias, who won the Lisbon location prize. Bot for shopping assistance. Bot sends SMS to mobile. Which was a mash-up of Carrefour, Matrix and Telestax.

Shared Shopping list by John Lyons who won the Brisbane remote prize. Shopping recommendations app. You can read more here: http://remotewhiteboard.com/blog/app/tadhack-winning-project-shared-shopping-list/

Shreenivas Iyer who used the Carrefour data set and WebRTC to create real time advertising marketplace for mobile using contextual / transactional data to surface appropriate offers for users. He won the Most Complete Solution Prize from TADHack Singapore.

OmniPresence by Ivan Tan, Kenneth Phang, Nikhil Bhandari, Pang Poh Chye, Hayden Ong, and Ken Chan. Facial recognition for account authentication and authorization for online / offline shopping. They won the Outside the Box / Best Overall prize from TADHack Singapore.

EasyBuy by Ramiro Blázquez González and Rodrigo Barbado Esteban, joint winners of TADHack Madrid. Mobile App with shopping recommender based on REST and SMS. Mash-up of Carrefour and Telestax.

QR Carrefour by Jose Antonio González Robles, Rafael Ortega Cáceres, joint winners of TADHack Madrid. Improve customer experience with payment. Mash-up of Carrefour and Tropo.

There were many other excellent hacks, showing interesting ways to improve Carrefour’s customer experience using telecom capabilities.

From Orlando, Store Chat by Chan Chiwhi. Store/Shopping assistant. Text to find items and the SMS bot will tell you where in the store you can find the item. Can also report other incidents in the store like spills, restock, etc. Mashing up Carrefour and Cisco Spark.

From Orlando, All the Things by Dale Ross. Repository of all the things you own. – keep inventory of all your things. Mash-up of Carrefour and Ubuntu.

From Boston, Carrefour Care For by Giris and Dani, which mashed up Carrefour and Voximplant.

From Voronezh, Smart Food Shop by Dmitry Kovtun, Denis Timkov. A lifestyle solution for better groceries shopping experience.

From Ukraine, Sergii Vakarin, Oksana Belopolska with  Carrefour Global Travel.

From Ukraine, by Stanislav Slesarev. TadCare Bot – your personal assistance for Carrefour

From Ukraine, by Dmytro Sakhno, Sergii Yuryk. App for sharing purchase lists Carregram

From London, Flow by Walid Behlock, Marc Daou, Nicolas Sleiman, Theo Jalabert. Smart grocery assistant – scan at home, order them back, learn from what you like, suggests healthier alternatives etc.

From London, Smart Cart by Sergio Hernandez, Preda Georgia, Popa Dragos, Daniel Savu, Sebastian-Valentin Burlacu. Web application which suggests items based on previous selections and items to complete your basket.

From Mexico, Foodmate by Gina Hernandez, Rodolfo Rincon, Ana Maria Gonzalez, Erick Ibarra, Alejandro Fernandez, and Denisse Maldonado. Application based on bot for restaurants suggestions and help for shopping.

From San Francisco, Nosh by Nanette Rosen. Distribute coupons and wine and cheese pairing access to website through SPARK. Mash-up of Carrefour and Cisco Spark.

From Madrid, GoCart by Jason Jiménez Cruz. Improving eCommerce experience. Mash-up of Carrefour and Telestax.

From Madrid, SmarterShopping by Tomas Šostak, Dane Mitrev, Tobias Lindener, and Tomas Lukas Komar. Improve customer experience with discount recommender. Mashed up Carrefour and Telestax.

From Madrid, BeaconShopping by Sergio Muñoz López, José Ángel Pérez, Guillermo García, and Antonio Fernández Llamas. Improve customer experience with beacons, and path and product recommendations.

From Moscow, kotiki. By Ivan Tertychnyy and Elmira Sibgatulina. Chat bot that finds food complements based on user selection. Also provides food recipes etc.

From Moscow, grocery shop by Marat Saakyan. Price hints based on person preferences, shows popular products and recipies. Integrated with Facebook Messenger.