In order to promote Red Bull Basement, a festival to inspire change in the city through the use of new technologies, we hacked the city for the better. "Smart Payphones" is a system that identifies the location of the payphone being used and offers real time information on the buses that make their stop there.

Sao Paulo has 19,000 bus stops, 15,000 buses. And real time data of the buses geo-location is available on the internet. But 2.7 million people in the city still don’t have internet on their mobile. Meanwhile the city has over 25,000 unused payphones. So we gave a new use to all these phones by making the bus tracking information available to everyone. When you dial 0800-887-0878 (toll-free) on any pay phone in Sao Paulo, the system uses the open data from Anatel (Brazil’s telecommunication agency) to pinpoint the location of the caller. It then crosses that information with the data from SPTrans to get the nearest bus stop and provide the information on the next buses that will arrive at their location.

With a great media coverage Red Bull managed to translate a niche concept to the general public and bring attention to its hacker festival. In one month, over 1000 calls were received from hundreds of different payphones spread out in the city. The video was viewed over 250K times on Facebook and the project was shared by main media outlets.