hackpsu

Inspiration

This is what dreams are made of.

What it does

_ Our application is designed to connect individuals looking to start a business with the professional services they need, no matter the category. We were interested in offering a platform where ambitious individuals could submit a description of their business and in turn they would be connected with both specialists they knew they would need to get their business launched as well as individuals who they didn't even realize would play a quintessential role in their business. One nuance we introduced to the freelance service platform was a flexibility in transaction models. We wanted freelance contractors and business entrepreneurs to be able to agree on compensation other than just money so when we continue to develop our application we will design a way for both parties to customize a reward contract that could be anything from a service in return for a service to a percentage equity in the young company needing specialized assistance.

How we built it

We used Android as our platform and interacted with Watson's Natural Language Understanding RESTful API in order to extract key concepts and phrases from the business entrepreneurs' business description and desired services in order to connect them with specialists that would be able to meet their needs. We used Firebase for authentication and database services.

Challenges we ran into

One of our most significant challenges was establishing a connection with the RESTful API. We also had a lot of difficulty with the initial set up of the real time, live updating database implementation in Firebase.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly pleased with our design decision to not specify a narrow category of services that would limit a business entrepreneur's ability to move forward with their ambitions. We wanted to interact with Watson because it introduced a greater degree personalized service which would drive customer satisfaction in production.

What we learned

We learned that with great difficulty comes the most rewarding knowledge and that it is good to rely on one another to maintain moral and optimize our collective ability as a team.