friend.me

Inspiration

Freshman students in college, people traveling to a new town because of a new job or just on a weekend adventure... Often times, chances are, those people don't know any one in that new town. So the options are Tinder, Hinge...so basically dating Apps...or Meetup which is not very relevant in smaller towns.... So we want an app that's simple, location based, and NOT for hooking up.

What it does

The app matches you to other people around you according to your interests and proximity. It allows you to get in touch and to set up a meeting. And it can suggest restaurants, bars, group activities around you as a possible place to meet.

How I built it & Challenges I ran into

We initially worked with phonegap... it was interesting and work somewhat. But we had issues connecting easily to a MangoDB database. Some others in the group, messed a little with Android Studio, since Java is a language many of us are comfortable with. But ultimately we decided to build a functional "minimum viable product" using Swift through XCode. Also, the designer in the group worked with advanced photoshop functionalities.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The final design is what we are the most proud of. We had quite a few variations. Basically we wanted a product that has a similar spirit to Tinder but was with a more innovative design (since the swiping motion has become so common). Using clickable bubbles to represent potential matches positioned using according to geo-distance (see dotted lines), really takes advantage of the bubble chart in displaying pretty much all data collected by the phone & user.

What I learned

The beauty of teamwork! It's not the end of the world if the initial tool you wanted to used was not the most suitable. Our motto is "Now we know! Next!"

What's next for friend.me_BostonHacks

Using Yelp's API to provide meeting location suggestion according to geo-distance between user and friend match. This will help the app generate money through restaurants, bars, clubs..sponsorship. The next next step if all goes well is having a business version of the app; it would connect the user with his or her LinkedIn contacts while on a biz trip. This version would be subscription based.