The New York Times has a yearly tradition of “Maker Week,” a weeklong hackathon when people form teams across departments to work on a product idea.
Our team came up with the concept of localized news, which we called TLocal.
Within a week of the Maker Week—when we managed to find time away from our day-to-day work 🙂—we built a standalone web app to demonstrate this idea in two ways:
1) News Near You: The app displays news based on users’ GPS location.
2) News from elsewhere: Users choose a place on a map, and the app displays news from that location.
We set up our booth in a conference room and showcased the application to all The New York Times employees. Here's a video screen capture of the app in action.