Rambler Takes Home The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Grand Prize, Learn To Drive And Radical Are Runners Up

Rambler, created by William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly, is a web app that lets users view their credit and debit card transactions on a map. During the dev process, the team tapped the Foursquare API for locations and the Plaid API to access user spending data.

via Rambler Takes Home The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Grand Prize, Learn To Drive And Radical Are Runners Up | TechCrunch.

This is an interesting science project.  The security implications however would cause me to steer clear of this app entirely.  I don’t understand what benefit anyone would gain from using this app and this is the grand prize winner.

Here’s another one

After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet.

If they’re that close to you why not just talk to them the old fashioned way?  And my favorite:

A project at our Disrupt Hackathon called “Bar Power” is an app that will remind you to “not be a douchebag.” It’s somewhat of a game, walking you through nice things to do when you enter a bar. For example, the app will suggest that you say “hi” to the bartender and introduce yourself. If you do it and mark it down in the app, you get some karma points.

Perhaps they should consider a little less coding/hacking and a little more focus on requirements.  My favorite comment about the above app:

BREAKING: Yahoo just acquired it for $300 million.

Foursquare’s API Is A Pillar Of The Mobile App Ecosystem

Pick up your smartphone. Search through some of your favorite apps. Do you have Uber? Maybe Foodspotting? Surely you have Instagram. These apps, as well as a significant amount of the most popular apps in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, use Foursquare location data. For developers who have user actions or content tied to Foursquare venue IDs it would be difficult (if not impossible in some cases) to migrate their services off the Foursquare location database.

via Foursquare’s API Is A Pillar Of The Mobile App Ecosystem | TechCrunch.

“Girls Around Me” Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings

For example: all these options in Foursquare default to on, which is really fine, since after all the service is about sharing your location. And linking it to your Facebook or Twitter account is a natural step for many. But at the same time it’s easy to fail to understand that one is providing a sort of path that strangers can follow from a face on the street to a name, other photos, current location, and a number of other things.

via “Girls Around Me” Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings | TechCrunch.

Foursquare

Foursquare, stylized as foursquare, is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users “check-in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.[3] Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges”.

via Foursquare – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.[4]