Hackathon Winner: Wordio
After moving to Tallahassee in 2012, I started working at a small startup that was part of an incubator program at FSU. Later that year, a hackathon event was announced for October, and several students from the incubator wanted to participate.
I joined their team, and together we developed Wordio — a platform that allowed users to listen to online content like news articles and blogs.
Our project ended up winning the competition. I worked on the backend and web frontend, using PHP/Zend and jQuery. By end, we actually had a decent number of features:
- Distraction-free mode, i.e., no ads
- Follow-along highlighting as audio played
- Instapaper and Twitter integrations
- TTS using iSpeech
- Content summarization using AlchemyAPI
Although building Wordio was a memorable and enjoyable experience, the project was eventually shelved as we all moved on to new opportunities.
News Coverage: