Tom attended a Hackathon in Switzerland.

Together with colleagues from Cube and Green Orange, I participated in the Alpine Tourism Hackathon in Pontresina, Switzerland, on 21, 22 and 23 March. Vera Engelbertink, Leo Bekhuis and Kristina Katkute from Green Orange, and I (Tom) from Cube accepted the invitation. You can read our experiences here.

Tom Tech Lead | Team Octagon

Reading time

3 min

The purpose of the Hackathon.

The Swiss government has created an innovative hackathon for the future of tourism in the Engadine region. After a long search, they found 10 young and groundbreaking start-ups from Europe to participate in this challenge. Needless to say, we were honoured.

We had to compete against 9 other companies in the race for the best, and the best executed, idea to maximise the potential of the region. The topics of the hackathon were; Gamification & New Media, Data Analytics and Chatbots. Since we had worked with developing Chatbots before, our choice also fell on this medium.

Getting to know the other teams.

A good 9 hours after we left Oldenzaal, we had reached our first hotel near Zurich. Here we exchanged the car for a bus ride to the train station. From there, we had a nice train ride through the Swiss Alps to our final destination; Pontresina.

Once we arrived, we saw the stately and traditional Cresta Palace travelling out among the mountains. This luxurious venue will house us for the next few days.

Pitches and chatbot 'Alpi'.

The next morning it was time for some pitches. Here we briefly told what our plan was for the next few days and also got first impressions of what the other start-ups had in mind.

For the next 3 days, we spent groundbreaking time writing meaningful sentences for our scenarios and crisp code for a favourable outcome. This resulted in the birth of our Chatbot 'Alpi'.

Hack-day!

Time to turn our ideas, concepts, knowledge and code into a working prototype. Since communicating with tourists around the world will not be through a Swiss platform, we decided to develop the Chatbot for Facebook Messenger. In it, users can easily chat with our Chatbot and get relevant information back based on their questions and answers.

We chose to build the bot with the Python programming language because it is a flexible and open-source language which makes it ideally suited for a Chatbot. The data is stored in MongoDB. The advantage of MongoDB is that we can write and retrieve the data faster and more efficiently because it is not a relational database management system. This way, we can accurately monitor which stage of a conversation the user is in.

Alpi in action.

After working for 48 hours and writing 3700 lines of code, we were able to present our prototype to the jury. Thanks to good preparation, we were able to make an inspiring presentation and convince the audience of the power of our Chatbot.

Unfortunately, we did not manage to win but we are happy that our story went down well with the audience and that they were very impressed with Alpi! I am sure this is not the last we have heard from her.