Interview with Steven G. Harms, winner of the Podio API release Hackathon

25.05.11 Posted in Customer Stories,Users,Work by Jon Froda

Some days you just know are going to turn into something memorable. Last Saturday was like that. For the launch of our API we invited a great crowd of developers to join a hackathon at the Podio store in San Francisco.

Six teams celebrated the launch of the API while competing for some cool prizes. The first prize, a beautiful Apple cinema display, went to ‘Team Solo” aka Steven G. Harms. His idea “Is it done yet” was timely executed and demoed at the end of the day. Steven passed by the store to chat about his hack, watch the video below, where he explains what it does and how he built it. The short story: You invite your neighbors (or your house-owners association) into a Podio space. You then use the “Is it done yet?” app whenever you experience problems with the building (like a water leak). When you post an issue in Podio, an SMS will be sent to the caretaker alerting him or her of the problem. When you think about there is a huge marketing for such community alert systems, and that was also one of the reasons why the judges decided on Steven as the winner. Congratulations! (Steven’s technical write-up is here)

The Runners up!
Some other great ideas were competing. The second prize went to Ching Mey and John Fan from cardinalblue.com. With their hack you pull up your Podio contacts and initiate a call with any of them right from the web interface, well you can even initiate a call between other users.

A couple of participants didn’t finish on time and couldn’t enter the competition. One of my favorites was Twilio’s Alan Davis. With his hack you schedule a conference call via a Podio app, add attendees, set time and then have people RSVP. The app will send an SMS reminder in advance and then call up the people on the attendee list on time. I heard that Alan is already working on adding the option of attaching the meeting as an .mp3 file and have it transcribed and put into Podio.
In fact most participants combined Podio’s collaboration, scheduling and workflow management with Twilio’s powerfull API for voice and SMS communications.

Podio API is now public, come play with it

If you want to get started building things on the Podio API go to the developer section of our website, and please get in touch if you have any questions. The entire Podio frontend is built on the API, and we’ve exposed it all for you to use too. If you want to build event-driven applications, you have the ability to register webhooks in your Podio apps as well.

I’d like to thank all participants for your creativity, for celebrating with us, and for making the API launch such a memorable day. We are looking forward to hosting more events like these in the future.