Powering Mass Innovation at Start-Up Weekend

Startup Weekend is a worldwide event that celebrates innovation, solves real world problems and brings together the best tech minds in the community. By the end of the event, every team launches a new startup in just 54 hours. At this year’s Startup Weekend Lahore, we made available our super simple SMS API that empowered developers to create apps for anyone with a simple mobile phone that had just SMS capabilities.

From the outset, we wanted our API to be dead-simple and understandable to developers with a minimum learning curve. The best way to do this would be through using technologies that developers are already familiar with. So, we’ve taken the radical notion that in order to make SMS applications, you simply design your app in HTML and Raven automatically converts this into an SMS experience. This makes use of your already existing knowledge of how to build web apps and takes away the hassle of figuring out how to integrate SMS and focus on what makes your app unique.

The best part? Raven API is free to use. We’re a strong believer in empowering builders and innovators and this is our contribution to the fledgling mobile economy.

In the 54-hour Startup event, teams of entrepreneurs, designers, marketers, technologists and programmers, worked to build technological solutions to existing problems.  Projects centered on healthcare, social accountability, charity, business-to-business contacts and the agricultural sector. Many teams were enthusiastic about incorporating this API as part of their projects, since the majority of the population does not have smartphones or internet access.

Throughout the event, we had an on-site team that coached startups on using our API, tutoring teams and in general helping them create powerful mobile applications for the public.

We’re very proud of the outcome: more than a third of the 22 teams used Raven including the winner of P@SHA’s Social Innovation Award:  Short Answering Machine. Many of the participating teams will be developing their product further, keeping Raven API as their core SMS connectivity module.  It will be up to the ingenuity of students or entrepreneurs to use Raven and change the way we live and work.

Interested in using Raven? Drop us an email at raven@pringit.com

Posted by Mohammad Ali