I recently joined a hackathon event at Boğaziçi University held by mobile backend solution company Netmera. I dont like to participate in conferences and talks as much as I do in the past (I participate A LOT in the past). They some how kill your productivity and I have never had a moment “wow that was a great conference, learned a lot to catch up with X technology or topic”. So hackathons are much valuable for me rather than just talking you just code and lets be honest in Turkey they are not so common. Anyway, I have need for an application that lets you sell your items just by taking picture (and optionally adding description later) no other bullshit. Cause I know from myself that I have tons of things that just goes to trash just because I couldnt spend time to put them to marketplaces like Sahibinden or Gittigidiyor or any other site. Take different pictures of the items, transfer them to your computer, fill lots of forms to just put your useless item to marketplace. (somehow mobile applications of these marketplaces do not allow to post your items directly from your mobile than what is the deal of having mobile app !?!?!). This process will kill about 30-45 min of your life and how about if you have 10 items to sell. I know we dont have “garage sale” model in Turkey but we just need similar functionality in mobile and I think people too so they select my application as winner at the end (SnapNSell).

• http://www.webrazzi.com/2012/07/16/netmera-hackathon-android-uygulamasi/
• http://www.gelecekonline.com/metin/netmera_android_hackathon_tamamlandi-14914
• http://cse.yeditepe.edu.tr/v2/en/news/2012/graduate-burak-dede-wins-netmera-android-hackathon/

It took my 5-6 hour to built basic functionality of the application. (Forgot to say hackathon targeted for android platform so app works on android platform). I wanted app to make someone life easier and took 3-4 min to just singup and list his/her item. Thats where hackathons comes in, if you have idea that you wanna build you always keep postponing. Find similar events and just dive into coding. Time, people etc all of these constrainsts push you to finish application at the end of the day.

Here is a simple flow of the application.

• Open up application, signup with faceboook (Facebook SSO if you have facebook app or facebook dialog if not)
• Take user location, show them what nearby people selling, great way to socialize and find interesting stuff
• Just open up the camera, take picture and your are done, your item is up.
• People can see your garage sale, comment or make inqury and at the end you can find yourself a deal.

Simple right but important thing here is its somehow tries to find a solution to “existing problem”. App is currently on android platform, I know it would be great also to built it for iphone (which would create more hype) but currently I am having hard time to find free time to do that. If anyone wanna do it for iphone be my guest just reach me. By the way event was great, food, different people all you expect from hackathon, hope to see more like this in the near future.

You can download SnapNSell app from market : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snapnsell.android . Feel free to send any bug or feature, it probably have bugs that I missed while developing.