Hidden Gems

Every feeling unproductive? Lonely? Like you have no direction? Hidden Gems gives you something to do every day so you develop a motivation to keep going

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Inspiration

Recently after the first year of university, we found ourselves unmotivated to be even the slightest bit productive. Between long-distance relationships, stresses at home, and stresses at work - sometimes it's hard to even get out of bed.

That's where Hidden Gems serves to brighten your day. Every time you feel unmotivated to work on a project or do anything at all, Hidden Gems gives you a mission each day from a selection of outings just to encourage you to get out of the house/dorm/etc. and simply accomplish something new even if that thing is as simple as taking a walk.

What it does

In each daily mission, Hidden Gems offers you points for each meter you walk from your current location. By raking up points you can track your progress on a day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month basis and see how you've developed over time. This, combined with a blockchain-based NFT scrapbook, allows you to capture each memory in a digitally unique time-stamped image that is immutable. Hence, you can further see your progress over time with a collection of memories that'll never change. Finally, if you yourself find a hidden gem, you can submit it to our database, as more people go to it and rate it, the higher it will appear in our suggestions.

How we built it

We started brainstorming ideas with simple whiteboard sketches and mind maps, due to the open nature of the hackathon we initially really struggled to pinpoint an area for our product. Once we found an issue that we both personally related to, we started more broad brainstorming.

Using Trello, we organized our workflow as a team so we always knew what we were working on. From there, our design lead made paper mockups while our tech lead tried to research how to implement certain features. Using Adobe XD we combined everything into a more concrete reality - due to time constraints, this wasn't full turned into a working launched mobile application, however, a bare bones web version was started. We used GitHub to secure our work and track changes.

In terms of technology, we primarily used Google Suite (Firebase and the Google Maps API) for majority of our functionality and authentication. We also intend to use Cockroach Lab's distributed SQL network to more rapidly search through a database of locations as opposed to firebases less efficient (more resource intensive) document based query model.

Additionally, Mintable was used for NFT minting and marketing on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was coming up with the idea, due to that time sink we didn't have as much time for implementation as we would've hoped. Additionally, due to time difference with our two teammates, it was at times hard to coordinate and be fully productive for the entire duration of the hackathon. Finally, the implementation of certain features, such as the integration with Google Maps proved to be a tall hurdle in the prototype's development (leading it to be stalled significantly with the XD prototype becoming the main focus).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we're really proud of this idea. Not only is it an app that'll help people, but it's one that is seriously feasible in the market. We belive that this could be a great idea going forward and with a little bit of hardwork and luck, can go a long way.

What we learned

One our team members had never experienced a hackathon before and hence learnt a lot about working under the constraints of a hackathon environment. Moreover, we all personally learnt how to work better under pressure and collaborate remotely. Lastly, neither of us are buisness students and we both really learnt the importance of thinking about the business end of a product in order for its success which is a key point in our application.

What's next for Hidden Gems

In short, we think this has a lot of long term potential and plan to build it out and pitch it (if not release it open source) because we genuinely think it's an idea that can help each and everyone whether on a good day or especially help give you the motivation to get through a bad one.

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