Beam

What it does

Beam is an app that helps you build and maintain meaningful relationships with your friends, family, and colleagues. It allows you to track important details about your contacts and provides recommended sharable content (articles, playlists, news, etc) based on their contact's profile.

How we built it

We started off by researching the problem space, building wireframes in Whimsical, and designing in Figma. From there, we implemented our designs into a mobile app created with React Native.

How it works

When recommending articles, our application first utilizes the News API to retrieve the latest articles on a person’s interests. From there, we determine the best article to suggest based on relevance. Our app then passes the news article’s URL to SMMRY API, which we use to summarize the content of the article. Our application also uses The Movie Database API to provide suggestions of movies and tv shows based on conversations you’ve had with your contact about other shows previously watched.

For custom and uncategorized fields, our application uses the Google Cloud Natural Language API to analyze the text field and identify its structure and keywords. After that, these words are passed to the Google Knowledge Graph API to categorize the keywords into entities. Once our application understands the context of the words, we can then pass them to appropriate APIs to generate our suggestions.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult brainstorming an initial concept because of the limited time we had to explore the problem and talk to potential users. Although our developers had some experience with React, using React Native to create mobile apps was new for us and took some time to understand the concepts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we were able to design and build an app that can impact people's lives and personal relationships. We communicated well, worked on a tight deadline, and learned a lot about hacking virtually on a cross-functional team. Our team also had a lot of fun working on this project together! 😊

What's next for Beam

In the future, we’d like to continue building features for Beam and expand on providing more types of recommendations based on entries. We would also like to launch our project to the App Store and test with users in order to improve user flows and refine key features of our app.

Built With

• axios
• expo.io
• google-cloud-natural-language-api
• google-knowledge-graph-api
• news-api
• react-native
• smmry-api
• themoviedb