It’s Grand Prix weekend in Montreal… but who cares about fancy cars and Crescent Street when #HackMTL is in town?
All the real acceleration will be taking place at Cossette HQ on Drummond and Sherbrooke in downtown Montreal between 9 AM and 7 PM on Saturday June 9th! We’re bringing together 14 amazing APIs and data sets for a day of brainstorming, building and demoing amazing social and local hacks (oh, and delicious food, snacks and beer, of course!). So what are some of the things you can build using Context.IO and some of the other sweet participating APIs? Remember, to qualify for a prize you must use one participating API in your hack, but the more you can mash together the better you’ll look to the judges. Here are a few mashup ideas for Context.IO and some of the participating APIs:
Context.IO and YellowAPI:
Emailing friends and family back and forth in an attempt to make plans? Trying to find a great local restaurant, bar or lounge to spend some quality time together in? Use our webhooks to monitor an inbox for instances of terms like “get together in Montreal”, ” NDG bar” or “Plateau restaurant” in the subject line, or for emails from specific addresses… the possibilities are endless. When an email meeting your pre-defined criteria is received, Context.IO posts the matching message to a callback URL of your choice. Based on the content in the subject line (neighbourhood restaurants, bars, etc), YellowAPI can provide a list of custom suggestions, including business names and addresses. You can’t get anymore SOCIAL and LOCAL than that!
Context.IO and SendGrid:
#HackMTL is excited to have two of the best email APIs together at one event! SendGrid can help add transactional email functionality to your hack, while we can help your app pull rich data from existing mailboxes. But the two definitely play together… add all of your apps’ newly created addresses as mailboxes in Context.IO and do amazing things! Scan these mailboxes for files, top contacts and more. How about seeing which accounts are receiving the most notifications from your app? Use Context.IO to extract these metrics. For example: you’ve created an app that automates pizza delivery? SendGrid will power the confirmation emails, and then Context.IO can extract which accounts are ordering the most pizza – at what frequency and at what times, resulting in extremely valuable sales data!
Context.IO and Rdio:
We’re so excited that Rdio will be providing not only the tunes, but a sweet music API to make #hackMTL a true party. Mash up Context.IO and Rdio by pulling all MP3s (by using our files calls and filtering out MP3 extensions) from a mailbox and building a corresponding playlist on Rdio!
Context.IO and Shopify:
Email contains a trail of every step involved in making an online purchase. Shopify shop owners would love to be able to pull in old receipts from their users to help make suggestions for future purchases. Build an app that makes this possible with a few simple messages calls with Context.IO! Retrieve receipts by filtering messages by subject(s) containing terms like “receipt for…,” “purchase confirmation for…,” etc. Pull in message bodies for those messages and extract product names to power a suggestion engine.
Context.IO and Freshbooks:
A Context.IO, Freshbooks and Twilio integration won last summer’s #HackVAN event with a customer service portal that displayed previous customer emails based on incoming calls and logged billing time into Freshbooks. Try something new at #HackMTL! Have Freshbooks import receipts/invoices from email for a spending/revenue analysis, or add billing to any of the other ideas listed here! Tell those investors you are ready for PAYING customers, from day 1!
Context.IO and TinEye:
Use TinEye to find matching image URLs for images contained in your mailbox! Pull all image files and compare them to TinEye’s image engine to see what matches you can find… especially handy if you’re not sure where an image came from, or if you want to see if it’s kicking around somewhere online!
We could go on… come and see Bruno or Sarah-Jane on Saturday if you have any questions at all about the above or integrations with any other of the participating APIs!
And… best use of the Context.IO API gets a $100 Apple gift card and 6 months of “Large” API access (a $600 value!).
See you Saturday!