Square’s First-Ever Hack Night
Square held Hack Night 0, where teams competed to build on Square’s growing commerce platform using existing and newly-released APIs. Sign up to join next time!
Written by Jonathan Andrew Wolter.
On July 19th, Square held its “Hack Night 0”, where teams competed to build on Square’s growing commerce platform using its existing and newly-released APIs.
Winner Ethan Fan’s creation, “Chatbot Ordering”, integrated with Square’s Items, Inventory and Register APIs to enable users to order ahead from a favorite food truck or restaurant by messaging a chat bot on Slack, then head straight to the register for quick pickup.
When a hungry user sends a Slack message asking, “What’s for lunch?”, the bot responds with available menu items using the Items and Inventory APIs, and is able to then take the user’s order. When it’s time to grab the food, checkout is smooth and speedy with Ethan’s custom point of sale using the Register API. The crowd’s favorite part? A visual tipping feature tied to emojis:
🙂 20% 😐 15% ☹️ 10%
Judges awarded Chatbot Ordering top prize for its simplicity, business potential, and of course, integration with Square technology.
Runners-up included Eric Cochran, who integrated the Register API for Android with IFTTT to intercept successful or failed transactions as a trigger for notification-based actions, and Nimitha Ramesh, whose proof-of-concept enabled eventgoers to pay for an event upon arrival at the door using the Register API for Android.
Want to hear about future Hack Nights? Follow @SquareDev and sign up to be notified. Jonathan Wolter (@jawspeak) | Twitter The latest Tweets from Jonathan Wolter (@jawspeak). Square. san franciscotwitter.com
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