Developers Spend 24 Hours Creating New Detroit Public Library App
By Edward Cardenas
DETROIT (CBS Detroit) - A pair of interns from Detroit Venture Partners spent 24 hours using their technical, organizational and personal skills to develop a new app for the Detroit Public Library.
David Kircos of Grosse Pointe and Hunter Rosenblume of Syosset, New York, won the the $5,000 grand prize for building the top app at the #hackDPL, which was Automation Alley's 24-hour hackathon to create the new library app.
"hackDPL seemed like an awesome way to help out the community and have the chance to stay up for 24 hours and build something awesome," said Hunter, a computer science major at Georgia Institute of Technology.
The app building competition was recently held at Automation Alley's Detroit office at Grand Circus. The duo worked together to speak with librarians to determine what they needed from an app, and proceeded to build an app that will provide library users with alerts and notifications about Detroit Public Library events, mobile payments and transcribed voice mail messages sent to staff.
"A lot of the the groups had a lot more features than we did, but the features we included were very usable," said Kircos.