Pioneer, recent winner of the Sears Retail Hackaton, is a platform designed to help Sears reorganize their products based on the specific reasons customers are shopping. According to Pioneer, the biggest problem is that most retailers organize their products into categories based on only basic criteria. This is where Pioneer comes into play.
Using OutSystems Platform, the enterprise Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) platform, Pioneer built a web application where Sears can organize products around personal themes. Whether that theme is buying a home or expecting a baby, Sears can use Elasticode‘s personalization functions to determine which themes to represent. This allows Sears to push products directly to consumers who are most likely in need of them, increasing consideration of the brand and bringing in more revenue for Sears.
Team Pioneer was selected out of over 120 attendees and almost 30 entries to win the Sears Grand Prize of $10,000 at the hackathon in January. The team was inspired by Songza, which curates music playlists based on time of day. Their idea was to create a “Songza-like concierge that curates products for specific users.”
Meet the Team
Corey Landers
What is your current role?
Brand Strategist at Fitzgerald & CO.
What projects have you worked on?
I’ve done some strategic consulting for startups for work, but other than that, none! I am taking a User Experience class through General Assembly, though, and looking to get more involved!
What are your best technical or creative skills?
Definitely more of a strategy guy; problem solving, ideation, insights and human truths and things like that! I do enjoy User Experience design and some aspects of Visual Design (though my skills in that area are lacking haha)!
Why the interest in Hackathons/Startups?
I love discovering problems and figuring out how to solve them, and I think that the best startups are based entirely around that idea. You can get a great understanding of people and the issues that exist by looking at emerging startups and the problems they are trying to solve.
Karl Falconer
What is your current role?
I am the Founder and Lead Architect for Dropstream. My day-to-day activities include product implementations for new clients and on-going technical product development.
What projects have you worked on?
Three years ago I started Dropstream to help logistics centers better integrate with their customers’ eCommerce platform. Today, Dropstream processes several thousand orders per day, helping to ensure the products you order online arrive exactly when you expect.
What are your best technical or creative skills?
My passion is with designing and implementing backend systems that solve problems for people.
Why the interest in Hackathons/Startups?
I participate in Hackathons as a way to work with other people in the startup community.
Rui Barbosa, Pedro Queirós & Rómulo Vasques
What are your current roles?
We all work at OutSystems with different roles. Rui Barbosa and Pedro Queirós on application development while Rómulo Vasques in IT infrastructure.
What projects have you worked on?
We build web and mobile applications using OutSystems Platform for our customers.
What are your best technical or creative skills?
Our main contribution was on the technical side, building the mobile app, the backend and the APIs.
Why the interest in Hackathons/Startups?
We work with the OutSystems Platform everyday on an enterprise environment with incredible results in delivery speed.
In the Sears Hackathon, we wanted to see if and how OutSystems Platform could be used by startups in a hackathon environment. We used the publicly available personal environment with great results and great insights.
We started coding Saturday morning, building a mobile app, integrating it with the Sears API. Then we created a web app to configure the themes and products, exposed a REST API. All this in the first day!
On Sunday, we did some bug fixing, loaded some sample data, tested the apps and documented the API.
That’s pretty fast, don’t you think?
