CoCo (Companies Connect)

COCO
Image Recognition with Text Processing

Inspiration

There are a lot of situations where you want to find all company details in one place, but it's challenging as resources are spread and can be hard to find. We wanted to bring them together in one place and present in an easy to understand format.

What it does

It's a webpage which interacts with our google cloud database and functions to bring all the company details to one accessible place. You can search for the company by many different attributes including company name, location, and industry. We have managed to gather data about 4 million companies around UK (over 250 million data items) which also includes their financial information (stock price, networth, cash on hand, debts and dues). We have a map displaying companies location from your current search. We also have a separate image recognition application which can recognize text on the image and output it as a string allowing you to view details about any company you see on the go.

How I built it

We built in on google cloud platform. To store all the data we used Google SQL and processed it using Google Cloud Function feature. We use HEAR maps API to display and interact with our map. For the image recognition and text processing, we used Google's Firebase. We also looked deeply into Google's Machine Learning API to work with our big data, but couldn't get it to work with the remote machine. All the functions were written in node.js and python

Challenges I ran into

Connecting all the different API and features together. We have heaps of functionality but a lot of it still has to be integrated together. Uploading 4 million records into the database and learning how to use the google big data functions effectively.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our extensive use of the Google cloud platform and the learning we did to make it work. The use of such a vast pool of data.

What I learned

Google cloud platform, here maps, extensive API usage, how to make web scrapers, deep and wipe machine learning. We also learned a lot about teamwork and collaboration.

What's next for CoCo (Companies Connect)

Machine Learning predicting whereas the companies shares will grow in future. Integrated functions to allow much deeper exploration of local companies. Partnership with stockbrokers to allow share purchases through the site. A premium version for financial workers to view all the data we have collected in a much deeper way.