For x.commerce innovate 2011 Hoccer teamed up with PayPal and Missionfish.org for showing Hoccer’s API abilities in a whole new way compared to what you saw on your phone so far. We coded a WebApp and a donation wall with which a charity (in our example it was the American Cancer Society) can collect donations for it’s cause. But how does this work?

The charity uses one or more large displays or projectors to show the donation wall (our example can be found here) which acts like a blackboard where all donations are shown to the audience of an event, a prom or similar. People who would like to donate use there smartphone to open a short URL (our example can be found here), the opened website shows a short form where the donor types in his name, an email address, a short comment and an amount. To send his donation the donor just makes a throw gesture with his phone (or taps a button in case the phone doesn’t support this) and the donation will be shown on the wall including the name,the comment and the amount the donor entered. To pay his donation the donor will receive an invoice using PayPal’s Invoice API

If you want to try our example just open the wall on your PC using a modern Browser (Chrome, Safari or Firefox) and open the WebApp on your phone. But remember: This is real! So please pay your donation . Also we put the code in a public github repository so if you want to use this for own charity feel free to use our example code. The backend was made by Ali Minaei from PayPal UK, thank you!

New features and possibilities

Hoccer just released Hoccer 2.2 for iOS. This update includes support for iOS 5 and also includes several new features including full video support, so now you can hocc videos without any hustle. Also this new version includes support for hoccering music out of your device’s iPod. For this Hoccer has to convert the selected song into a new format, this can take some time and also only DRM-free songs can be converted. Here is a quick list of what else has changed in Hoccer 2.2 for iOS:

• Support for pasting content into Hoccer: Just select “Paste” in the “Select Content”-Menu or tap and hold in the middle of the Screen.
• A nicer image viewer in the history: In allows you to pinch and zoom just like the Photos-App of your iPhone
• A better data representation: Photos won’t be cropped and vCard Details will be shown on the card.
• Fixed some crashes and issues
• New graphics in the tutorial

If you have found any bugs or if you have a idea how to improve Hoccer on iPhone don’t hesitate to write my a note philip@hoccer.com