Flock

Never lose your friends again

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Inspiration

Even in today's connected world, it is easy to get separated from the people you care about. Flock's simple setup and real time tracking capabilities, eliminate the anxiety of getting lost in the crowd and keep "birds of a feather", together.

What it does

Flock allows its users to share their physical location with people they know and care about for limited periods of time. Flock eliminates the anxiety of a child wandering off momentarily and the struggle of gathering friends back together at an amusement park or after a concert. Flock can alleviate tension between friends with very different interests and provide logistical intel, and a sense of comfort in emergency situations when groups are unexpectedly split. Flock can even help you locate your phone if it gets stolen or lost!

How we built it

Flock is an android supported app that uses Microsoft Azure and Cognitive Services to make identifying friends and family members in your group easier than ever. Pictures a user takes are matched against user data stored in a FireBase database. Once a user approves being added to a new group, their location is shared with all group members using the real time data in FireBase mapped on Google maps.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing APIs was not as easy as we originally assumed. We also had difficulty merging APIs and figuring out the specifications of the tools we needed to create our app. Because we were designing our entire project on the fly within the time constraints of the hackathon, it was difficult to take the time to research implementations that may have been more simple once we had chosen our path.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We put a lot of work into the project and we've been able to accomplish and overcome a lot of issues that came up.

What we learned

A lot about Firebase. A lot about Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure.

What's next for Flock

In it's current state, Flock does not save contacts or photos past the predetermined grouping time limit. Though using Flock to share your location with friends is still easier than typing names, making calls and sending snapchats or searching through contacts for people, it is still a bit of a nuisance for connections that are commonly together. In the future, Flock will support users to agree to be remembered as group members of a particular group which would enable regrouping without the need for taking pictures.

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