Coosto Hackathon: a training in innovation
When even the most superstitious colleagues are looking forward to a day like Friday the 13th, you just know something special is going on. A quick look at the calendar clarified a lot: December 13th 2019 was marked as the day of the Coosto Hackathon.
The Coosto Hackathon is a yearly internal event, in which we challenge our colleagues to work on their own creative and innovative ideas. The most important precondition: you have to present the fully-fledged and worked out idea within one day to the rest of the company.
An event like the Hackathon helps Coosto to remain creative and renewing. It is the perfect occasion to think outside the box and maybe find new usable features for our product. Let’s call it a training in innovation.
Coosto + 1
No time to lose, we had to get right to it. The theme of this year’s Hackathon was called ‘Coosto + 1’, which meant we had to think of an idea that contained a combination of Coosto and a concept, feature or idea of another tool or app.
A variety of 8 interesting projects, worked out by a total of 33 colleagues, emerged from this theme. The ideas in a nutshell:
Tinder-like message approval
What would you get if you’d combine Coosto with the swipiness of an app like Tinder? This project decided to find out an presented a working prototype. A simple swipe gesture to the left or right would allow you to handle messages in Engage.
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Did you know... ...the search helper in Coosto Listen derives from the winning project of the 2017 edition of the Coosto Hackathon? |
Coosto Cards
This group presented a feature that was copied off the filters of Google Cards. Instead of setting general filters, you would be able to set Coosto filters in the search results. This would mean you can exclude the language, author and/or topic in every search result.
Coosto Periscope
Do you remember Microsoft’s Clippy? Why wouldn’t we try implement the little assistant in a Coosto theme? The goal of this project was to help customers directly in the tool, without having to navigate to the Support Center.
Lunch platform
This project didn’t find its inspiration in the product of Coosto, but in the internal lunch. They came up with a platform on which employees could make food suggestions and manage their attendance. This would help our lunch staff to prepare the right amount of food and stop waste.
Coosto LMS
This team came up with an idea to make a Coosto training more interactive. They set up a Learning Management System; one interface for all training information, using quizzes and tasks to assess whether a trainee masters Coosto sufficiently.
The podium
No hackathon without winners. A skilled jury chose the 3 best projects at the end of a great, tiring day.
Bronze: Coosto Loyalty
What if the daily use of Coosto would challenge you a little bit more? Let’s make a game out of it, this group imagined. By analyzing data in Listen, handling conversations in Engage en scheduling posts in Publish, you would earn points and badges. This would start a competition with your colleagues for the funniest and most legendary badges. Who gets the top spot in the leaderboard?
Silver: Coosto Break
A mini-game in Coosto. Fun, but what’s the point of it? This team had the answer: “Break stuff and recharge!” Every Coosto user who wants to express their frustrations after the umpteenth complaint of their customers, would have to start this game. Press a button and use a mouse to drag all Coosto elements to the edge of a screen and demolish them one by one. Wow, that’s a relief. You’re fully recharged to yet again be sympathetic to your customers.
Gold: Coosto Assistant
The winners presented an impressive piece of ‘Coosto + 1’, according to the jury. Their starting point: managers want to be up-to-date with their brand’s latest social media statistics fast and easily. That is why this project combined the intelligence of Google Assistant with the power of Coosto. No need to log in to Coosto, just ask your Google Assistant for the current situation on your smartphone or smartwatch. Coosto would push the data and Google would read your statistics aloud. An almost flawless demo showed it can be done!
Let’s make Coosto even better
There’s that. After this Hackathon we’re fully recharged with new inspiration for product improvements in 2020. Do you as a Coosto user have your own innovative feature requests? Please, share them with us. Hit the Feedback button in Coosto to submit your idea or vote for existing ideas.
Here’s to a beautiful and innovative 2020!
