What’s a DevJam, you ask? Basically it’s a hands-on workshop/hackathon for API/mobile developers, architects and API enthusiasts.

 

dsc_0044.jpg

 

This is Ticketmaster’s eighth DevJam globally, with more than 400 avid devjammers from around the world taking part in Ticketmaster hackathons in Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and Quebec City. Senior executives from Ticketmaster’s Global HQ in Hollywood flew over to join their UK and European counterparts, and get up close and code with developers from across London.

Over the past year Ticketmaster has picked up four awards at Techworld’s Techie Awards including ‘best place for developers to work’, ‘rock star developer’, ’innovative team’ and ‘The Techies 2016 Grand Prix award’, as well as V3’s ‘Best Place to Work in Digital’. The DevJam gave developers a rare insight into the company’s culture of support, development, and commitment for constant change and innovation.

 

dsc_0142-768x512.jpg

 

The TM Towers doors opened on Saturday at 9 o’clock to a mix of over 50 keen developers and anyone with an interest in Ticketmaster tech for a day filled with coding, prizes and pizza.

The theme of the DevJam was ‘event discovery’ – the aim was to have our APIs mashed up with other APIs to create meaningful experiences for fans.

 

dsc_0153.nef_-768x512.jpg

 

The aspiring developers presented 11 different ideas to a table of tech legends, including Ticketmaster’s own Troy Suda and Ismail El Shareef, along with Tech Crunch’s Editor-at-Large, Mike Butcher and Music Ally’s Karim Fanous.

The winning ideas were:

1st place: Smart TV app – This concept was developed by the founders of http://www.tickx.co.uk who came down from Scotland that morning! They basically built an HTML5 experience that runs on your TV to find nearby music events and automatically plays the artist’s most popular song on Spotify. This is meant to help music fans discover nearby events through the music of the artists performing. They built the whole thing soup to nuts in 4 1/2 hours. Very impressive! Prize: Pantom 3 Advanced Drone with GPS-Assisted Hover, a Vision Positioning System and Unmatched Propulsion.

2nd place: Live Nation calendar integration – The Live Nation crew presented a great idea of letting fans know about events that might be of interest to them by pushing the events to the fans’ calendars instead of using the sometimes-annoying push notifications or emails. This way, the fan can decide to decline the invite or add it. If they choose to add it to the calendar, chances are they’ll never miss out on an event! This was Mike Butcher’s (TC) favorite idea. Prize: GoPro HERO Session Camera with single-button control, stunning 1080p60 video, 8MP photos and a waterproof design.

3rd place: Siri-like integration – The developer behind this innovation was inspired by the Amazon Echo integration we showcased during kickoff. He used an open-source voice-to-text technology with Siri-like capabilities to turn his voice commands into queries that he then used to hit the Discovery API and get back list of events. He made it to 3rd place because of the complexity of the tech involved and the fact that he was able to do it all in less than 4 hours. Prize: Box seats to see Arsenal Football Club at Emirates Stadium.

 

dsc_0047-768x512.jpg

 

A special shoutout goes to the one developer (who flew in from Amsterdam just for the devjam!) who working with both the Discovery API and the Microflex API for Discovery and his feedback was that the new Discovery API was “much much easier to use than the older API”, which is encouraging knowing we’re building the right global API of the future.

A massive thank you to everyone who came along and made this DevJam possible! We look forward to the next one!