India’s first, highly anticipated Beacon App Hack Day garnered a lot of excitement and saw invite requests from iOS developers all over India. Out of the hundred plus registrants, we chose 20 iOS developers who walked into the MobStac office in Bangalore on a sunny Saturday morning. We published a blog post yesterday and tried to capture all the excitement into the post. After 12 hours of vigorous sessions on iBeacon technology, intense hacking, energy drink chugging and trouble shooting, 10 unique iOS apps were demoed on Saturday night, and they just blew us away.

By 9 pm, the presentation room was packed like sardines as people saw 20 talented iOS developers showcase how their applications used beacons to help enhance customer experiences across various industry verticals – from virtual shopping assistants to personal pets with a virtual life to personal productivity apps and apps to keep track of calorie count, there was ideas from all directions. The Hack Day was designed to foster beacon app development. They were also offered free invites to BeaconStac, a beacon-agnostic software platform that enables beacon-triggered proximity messaging and analytics based on user behaviour in mobile apps.

All the teams competed vigorously with clear winners emerging only at the end after much deliberation. The winner was chosen based on 4 criteria: originality of the idea, usefulness of the app, the app design and the way the teams demoed and presented their app. The winners – Disk and Drive The winning application, Disk and Drive, is a virtual store assistant that helps personalize consumer shopping experience in a movie rental store. It uses beacons to offer consumers personalized movie suggestions based on their previous purchase history and other interactions on social media rather than spamming them with random suggestions. It also worked around the checkout scenario by integrating beacons with the app to trigger discounts only when the consumer’s mobile device is within the proximity range of the checkout beacon. Adding to this, the app even allowed consumers to view customer reviews and recommendations below each listed movie. Here is a cool repo that they’ve published on Github, in case you’re interested.

The runners up – Health Stack The runners-up created an app called Health Stack, which includes a navigation feature that directs consumers to the non-vegetarian or the vegetarian counters based on their choice within a restaurant. It also allows users to choose food options wisely, based on calorie information, suggesting whether a particular item is high on calorie count or is on the healthier side. You can check their app out here. Can’t wait to learn about the remaining apps? We’ll publish them here soon. Check out our developer blog for more content related to beacon app development.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!