The Square Unboxed Hackathon Winners
Announcing the winners of the overall and special categories sections
Square Unboxed is always an exciting time of year here at Square. For months leading up to the event product teams work to prepare their exciting announcements for the big stage. While we were preparing the announcements we came up with an idea: what if we kicked off a hackathon at Unboxed to see what developers could do with the new components we were about to announce? With that the Square Unboxed Hackathon was born.
The challenge was even broader than last time: build an application with any of our APIs or SDKs. However, applications that used Square Terminal API, Snippets API, or Web Payments SDK would be eligible for special prize categories. There were also booster prizes for most impressive technical integration that wowed our engineers and most creative solution that wowed our product managers and business development managers. Needless to say, the developer community more than rose to the challenge. We were seriously impressed by the quality of the dozens of submissions from developers from all over the world.
Today we’re excited to announce the winners of the Square Unboxed Hackathon. These were the applications with the highest scores based on our judging criteria:
- Quality: Includes creativity and originality of the idea
- Implementation: how well the idea was executed by the developer
- Potential Value to Businesses: the extent to which the solution can help a business grow
The Winners of the 2020 Small Business Hackathon:
Overall
First Place and Most Creative Idea
App name: Flash Order
Developers: Jonlund Lund & Weston Hafen
Developers’ Description: One button ordering is now a new ordering channel for the Flash Order platform. Via the Flash Order app a smart button is linked to the Square Terminal and is configured to order a specific menu item. When the button is pressed the ordering details are sent to the Flash Order cloud and routed to the Square Terminal for payment.
Second Place
App name: watQ
Developers: Cliff Dias, Fabio Nobrega, Jameson O’Reilly, & José Abreu
Developers’ Description: In the simplest terms, watQ? connects a customer to a merchant by enabling the customer to view the merchant’s menu, place an order and deliver the order to the Merchant's Square POS.The Merchant’s inventory in Square is synchronised in the middleware allowing us to generate a consistent user experience for the retail customer. The Middleware uses the Square APIs to synchronise data.
The mobile app [integrates] the middleware and presents the shopping experience using the Merchants branding. watQ? enhances the Square capabilities by adding features like support for earliest delivery time and breaking down modifiers into categories. For example, when the order comes through to the POS, the merchant is notified whether the customer wants to remove, add or provide instructions.
Special Unboxed Categories
Best Snippet for Square Online
App name: Photoreview
Developer: Rowland Saer
Developers’ Description: Photo Review is a social validation app that allows you to post original content or repost content from your customers on your product page using your Instagram feed and a hashtag. Creating a carousel that displays all the Instagram posts that have the hashtag you selected.
Best App for Square Terminal Overall
App name: Zaastry with PaymentEye
Developers: Miko Aro
Developers’ Description: Zaastry web software is used for accepting online ordering and payments from customers using Square APIs and SDKs. The Terminal POS and PaymentEye software in the merchant shop are used for accepting in-person payments using the Square Terminal device
Best use of Web Payments SDK with another Square API
App name: mrkntile
Developers: Lauren Shultz
Developers’ Description: mrkntile aims to solve 2 main problems: Help local sellers without a physical location find shops in the area with extra space willing to display their items. Provide both parties with the tooling they need to easily manage the partnership by integrating with their Square accounts so the shop can take payments directly on behalf of the seller.
Most Impressive Technical Integration
App name: React Square Web Payments SDK
Developers: Rowland Saer
Developers’ Description: React-square-web-payments-sdk is a library that will help developers easily build payment forms by passing only some parameters and having a Square account.
To view the winners’ demo videos, or to view the other submissions, check out the competition page.
In the coming weeks we’ll be working with the winners to evaluate whether they’d be a good fit for the Square App Marketplace. We would like to thank everyone who submitted an application to the Square Unboxed hackathon. We’re inspired by your creativity and ingenuity, and appreciate the time and effort that was put into each submission.
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