Uber recently hosted a joint hackathon with the U.S. Department of Transportation at it's east coast headquarters in D.C. The ride hailing giant challenged local D.C.-area developers at its 3-day event to design software using their API in conjuncture with data from USDOT, the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The winning team, named Team Happy Home, designed a solution that will be able to "find the best places to rent currently available apartments, while keeping transit time and cost down and adjusting for other factors such as the AARP Livability Index," said Kevin Hawkins, a member of Happy Home.
By correlating all of this data and triangulating affordable rental housing locations, Happy Home plans to offers a definitive set of recommendations for renters looking for the perfect house that fits both their professional and personal lives.
"We all agreed that the data available would present for an amazingly data-driven solution to a problem we all had faced. I didn't know any of the others before the hackathon began. The team formed after I was given a mic on Saturday morning and presented my idea ... I came up with the name ProjectHappyHome because the time spent commuting to and from work has been shown to affect happiness," Hawkins told DC Inno.
Interestingly, Hawkins and his teammates had not originally planned to attend the full weekend hackathon. But after the event's introductory session, where a panel of speakers discussed the future of public transit, they decided to stay and compete.
Now, the people behind Happy Home, most of them strangers before attending the hackathon, hope to launch a new company. Today, they are meeting to "roadmap a plan."
In mid-March, the group has a meeting with the Uber API team to potentially turn their idea into a technology product.
"[In the future], we'd like to integrate data from platforms such as D.C.-based CoStar's Apartments.com which is similar to Trulia/Zillow and add data sources that factor in biking, bikeshare, trams (such as the DC streetcar) and more," Hawkins said. This more include the ability to hail an Uber to go visit one of ProjectHappyHome's suggested housing options.
