BlendR

Connecting professionals, bridging communities.

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Inspiration

Inspiration behind BlendR is the stem from the desire to incorporate the principles of inclusivity and diversity in any modern professional networking platform. By creating a safe and welcoming space for all professionals, the project could foster a sense of community and belonging that is often missing from traditional professional networking events.

What it does

BlendR is a diverse in-person platform that offers a chance to promote the distinctive viewpoints and experiences of people from various origins. The venue of an event can be entered by a user scanning the QR code of the room where they would find other attendees, scan through their profiles to see the interests, and then go talk to them in person after nudging them. This allows for a more meaningful conversation than simply chatting up everyone and having left nothing within the memory. This may result in a more dynamic and forward-thinking professional network that is better able to handle difficult problems and come up with workable answers.

How we built it

  • Tech Stack: We built this platform by primarily using Node.js, html, CSS for our frontend and backend, Firebase for authentication of our Google Maps API and other authentications, MongoDB as our database to store users' details.
  • Approach: The user logs in into the virtual map of the venue. Security is taken care by - (1) allowing user to enter only of the entered email address matches our records of registered email addresses in the DB. (2) the physical location of user should be around the venue since it's an in-person event - in order to avoid spoofing. After entering the venue, they can scan through various people based on their proximity (Indoor Positioning System), look into their profiles and interests and approach the person of their choice to connect with.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenge behind this project was to figure out Indoor Positioning System. Since we know GPS is only useful for outdoor locations -- it is very difficult to find granular locations of each individual within a room. After extensive research we found MapsIndoors developed by MapsPeople which remediates this problem by empowering users with features from way-finding to desk booking and visualization of real-time information, all in the same place. We can create our indoor maps on MapsIndoors CMS and then work our way through it -- basically a Low Code, No Code approach to the problem. But the CMS service is paid service and we didn't have ample resources to build on it (future prospects). As a workaround, we put pin to the location (latitude and longitude) of each user using Google Maps API and zoom into it enough so that each user is visible in the arena and then update the location every 2 seconds to record the latest location of each user and also update it into the DB.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To us, the greatest achievement was coming up with this original concept. It is difficult to incorporate an inclusive environment in a personal setting, and if something goes wrong, it could negatively affect a person for the rest of their life. Second, we were pleased with our improvised Indoor Positioning System solution, which improved the one we already had and supported our conviction that the solution was workable.

What we learned

We gained a great deal of knowledge regarding the cooperation and teamwork that are fostered by hackathons. We have not only gained knowledge of new technologies and viewpoints from one another, but we also firmly feel that each member of the team is essential to the success of the project and that we couldn't have done it without any one of them. On the technological front, we are pleased to report that everyone can now produce a presentable UI page (lol). We also discovered that if you ask for help and don't be hesitant to accept it, mentors will come and help you. The mentors were really helpful throughout, and I want to thank them for their unwavering assistance.

What's next for BlendR

As our next steps, we would integrate the MapsIndoors API for exact indoor location mapping and would also brainstorm more on spoofing loopholes if the QR gets distributed to the wrong people.

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