Inspiration
The idea came about when we were walking around Brown's campus. It seemed like a really cool place to hang out and as we discussed random ideas, one idea that stuck out was the fact that people need more surprise in life.
What it does
So we decided to build a platform that would create a separate 'travel' savings accounts for our users and everytime they made a transaction with their Capital One cards, the remainder of the amount that rounds up to the nearest whole number is transferred from their checkings to this travel accounts. For example, if an item costs $9.60, the remaining 40 cents that round it up to $10 will be moved to the travel accounts. Over time as the money accumulates, we would do a constant background check with Rome2Rio and TripAdvisor and pull possible trips based on the account balance. This would not only create a more interesting travel portfolio for people but also make people live with surprises and make quick travel decisions.
How we built it
We envisioned this as a website so we started building with HTML5, CSS3, PHP and MySQL. We used JavaScript to make API calls to Capital One's API and do things like create the travel accounts, transfer money to the travel account etc.
Challenges we ran into
We couldn't even get close to finishing the project because Capital One's API was not working well with JavaScipt at all of our post requests were getting denied (because of their network security). We weren't very happy about that. We could have built this entire platform had their API supported us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I wish we had something to say here. But this hackathon didn't prove to be very motivating for us as the project we envisioned couldn't be realized.
What we learned
We learned that JavaScript is a very unstable language for API calls. We will always use Python from this point on.
What's next for Hazelnut
When we reach home, we will attempt to complete the project with other Bank Technologies and travel companies like Rome2Rio (since TripAdvisor's public API is nor very helpful -> only provides hotel prices).
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