Foursquare Hack Unlocks Building’s Front Door
13 December, 2010
Scott Lachut, PSFK Labs
In Brief
A pair of Brooklyn developers have rigged their front gate to open with a simple mobile check-in.
Developers Erin Sparling and Nicholas Hall have imbued mobile-social network, Foursquare, with an additional layer of utility by rigging their building’s front door so that it opens when they check-in to their apartment’s address. The duo accomplished the workaround with the help of Foursquare’s local push notification service, Alpha 2.0 API, an industrial web-enabled relay device, some speaker wire and plenty of ingenuity. On New Year’s Eve the hack will be opened to everyone, enabling party goers easy, digital access to the celebration upstairs, likely turning the affair into a must have check-in for any aspiring mayor.