1st place winners at Apps4Thessaloniki competition

We won the 1st place award for our innovative HotCities concept at the Apps4Thessaloniki national competition, in a ceremony which took place on the 29th of January 2016.

The team, comprised of Andreas Komninos, Jeries Besharat, Giorgos Papadimitriou and Eirini Lagiou, presented a cool new service for tourists, which collects checkin data from social media such as foursquare and we use this data to highlight the popular areas and venues. Our service can be found as a web based application, a mobile application for Android using standard 2D map and an augmented reality application for Android. At the core, our service is able to support the design of thematic routes for walking within the city. The user can select between three different types of route: Shortest path, Thematic route and Hot route.

Routes are created by the user, simply by specifying a starting and ending point for their walk. Our algorithm then determines suitable waypoints for the user and passes them to the Google directions API, to generate the walking instructions. The difference between the three types is how the calculation of each route is done. The shortest path route show the standard directions as they are returned from the API. The thematic route type is used when the user wants to take a tour around the sights of the city. Currently the application supports three types of sightseeing (Museums, Statues and Squares) but can easily support any number of themes. This type of route, finds the points of interest which are near the shortest route between the starting and ending point, and creates a new route which takes the user past these waypoints. Finally, the hot route is calculated from our knowledge of where the popular areas are, depending the time and day, based on social network check-ins. This type of route takes the user through busy areas of the city, which can be different through the day, as some neighbourhoods are quiet for example in the day but come alive at night. The user can select and remove additional points of interest and the application will update the route based on his selections.

More details here http://thessaloniki.appsforgreece.eu/hot%CE%B8ess

and on our website http://www.hotcities.gr