Another hackathon win! This time with a bigger team of SMU talent for the Ericsson Technology For Good Hackathon to:
develop an application which will help the North Texas Food Bank solve some of their business problems.
Our app, BiteBlast, is a phone-blast system for the North Texas Food Bank to send out instantaneous notifications that can be answered by local food pantries on their phone, tablet, or computer, and give them immediate feedback.
This application is especially useful for large shipments of perishable goods. Currently, when they receive a shipment of perishables (like fresh vegetables), the North Texas Food Bank must update its inventory system, which updates its inventory page (which local food pantries will frequently have someone constantly refreshing so they can get their orders in first), then wait for order forms to come in from food pantries before they can start shipping it out.
With our system, the notification and feedback is nearly instantaneous.
For this project, we made heavy use of the Twilio platform (to manage the phone blasts), WebRTC (to enable calling from the browser), and the fantastic Twitter Bootstrap styling theme.