Alexa Startups

Inspiration

We often hear about this idea of investing in your community, but almost as often we lack a way to truly execute upon such conviction. We were inspired by the idea of giving people a method to discover the types of businesses that are based out of your community and could, as a result, benefit the locale both directly and indirectly.

What it does

The Alexa skill allows you to effortlessly ask your Echo device to search for businesses based on the location specified. It returns the 3 most recently updated results in the CrunchBase database.

How We built it

By contacting CrunchBase and obtaining API keys for their Open Data Map service, we were able to create a service which would interpret the voice commands passed to our server by the Alexa service and then determine the proper way to query the database. Then we would parse the response and provide the Alexa service the proper response. We utilized a database to store queries anonymously for future reference.

Challenges I ran into

There were many issues with getting the API implementation correctly and then there were many issues with properly parsing the JSON returned by the API. We also had issues with JS scoping which often made implementation very slow.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Creating a fully functional and useful tool at one of our first hackathons. Overcoming challenges that felt insurmountable, like a scoping issue that took hours and even stumped a mentor for almost half an hour.

What We learned

We learned that it's really important to spend the time to set up an efficient development environment because the challenges of working in a messy dev environment where you can't easily debug will exponential cost you more than taking the time to have the best dev environment from the beginning.