#yahoo open hack

So, I got accepted this July for Yahoo! Open Hack in Bangalore. It was a great experience. We developed two hacks in 24 hours. DirectCab and Flagged! (details below). 

DirectCab:

DirectCab is a unique hack, which bridges the gap between passengers and cab providers by directional marking (with information about incremental distances from source location) and navigation routes on Yahoo! Maps. It helps calculating distance, estimated time of travel and cab fair including surcharge% between two locations to avoid any excessive charges by cab drivers. It has in-built merchandise facility for instant payment of cab fair for the customers registered with the cab service, which happens through PayPal's Adaptive Payments API. 

Flagged:

Flagged! is an interesting general knowledge game for children aged 5-8 yrs based on question/answer methodology. A set of Questions/Answers related to Country and their Capitals is stored within the application. Yahoo! YQL API is used to fetch the flag images and the current news for the respective country. Most importantly, speech recognition and voice synthesis have been extensively used keeping Accessibility in mind with both keyboard and speech based input/output for audible questions/answers.