JioLah!

Perspective screens
Deals page
Profile page
Map page
Profile pop-up
Chat page

Inspiration

As we all know, school has just started a week ago. There is this coffee place called Maxx Coffee that recently opened at NUS CLB. They have this promotion (ALL DRINKS AT 1-FOR-1) going on right now. Like all Singaporeans, I am naturally attracted to these promotions. However, as my timetable is very different from all of my friends, I haven’t had the opportunity to "jio" anyone to enjoy this promotion thus far. Hence, I was rather disappointed that I might not be able to enjoy this promotion before it’s ultimately gone.

BUT… there was a silver lining though. I actually came up with an idea regarding this! So, before the hackathon, my teammate, Maxx (not at all related to the aforementioned coffee place by the way; just a coincidence) and I have done some market research and realised that there is currently this gap in the market. I am sure we all know there are a lot of 1-for-1 promotions in Singapore. KFC, LiHo, Starbucks, McDonalds, etc. You name it, they have it. Sure, we have these telegram bots such as @sgfooddeals, @goodlobangpolice, etc., which regularly advertise such good deals/promotions. However, there is no dedicated platform to allow strangers to easily get together and enjoy these promotions together. Until now, that is.

What it does and how I built it

JioLah! is a mobile application, which we hope, will provide this convenient platform for Singaporeans. In just 24 hours, we came up with a Telegram bot and an Android application to showcase the core features of the initial phase of JioLah!

The telegram bot is responsible for scrapping F&B deals from some of the aforementioned popular Telegram channels. Every time there is an update from these channels, the bot will send the freshly arrived deal to the mobile application. The bot, which is written in Python, is hosted on Firebase.

The Android application serves as the front-end interface for the users. We implemented 3 main pages, namely Deals, Inbox, and Profile. As mentioned previously, the Deals page consists of all of the curated deals sent by the Telegram bot. Users may scroll through the list and select the deals they are interested in. By doing so, they are able to advertise to other interested people about their willingness to "share" or enjoy the promotion together. The Inbox page holds all of the chats a particular user has with other people. The main purpose of this in-app communication platform is to allow people to liaise easily and most importantly, anonymously. The chat functionality is supported by a third-party library known as ChatKit. Last but not least, the profile page allows the user (in a future iteration) to specify their interests so as to provide an overall better app experience (i.e. deals list catered to individual interests). The backend of the mobile application is hosted on Firebase due to its scalability (who am I kidding? The true reason is it's free~)

TL;DR: 5 cans of red bull and 2 cases of diarrhoea. Red bull gives you shizzies!

Challenges faced and Lessons learnt

There were numerous challenges we came about while creating JioLah!. Among those, two main issues are issues relating to the security and also the integration of the code. As we are pushing the code to GitHub, there were numerous warnings regarding the sharing of those credentials. This led us to restart our GitHub project and ensure that potential sensitive data are handled with .gitignore.

There were also multiple issues with the integration of different aspects of our code, where we would spent countless time to debug it. If there is one thing to take away, it is the fact that we should first optimise the methods, and ensure that the methods are kind of fool proof before carrying on the coding as sometimes it leads to more complications along the way.

Not only that, even though we are somewhat experienced in android development, we realised that time is always the limiting factor and we have to strike a fine balance between the complexity of the features, as well as the level of details in each feature that we want to accomplish ideally during the hackathon.

One other thing that we took away is that there are in fact there are a lot of resources online, but sifting through the right one is the key to creating a more efficient application, as there are many methods, mostly roundabout ways of accomplishing a single objective.

Accomplishment

I think the biggest accomplishment for us is that we managed to make the application ready to deploy amongst our close circle of friends, which we did earlier in the morning of the second day. #nosleep

However, this is not the final step. we are intending to take this further and beyond, so that the area of social influence JioLah! has within Singapore would grow, and that along with the growth, it will be able to sustain itself without much costs incurred towards us.

Whats next for JioLah! ?

Amongst many other features we have in store for JioLah!, three of it will be listed down.

JioLah! will be aiming to jump into the huge market potential of the retail industry, such as clothing and spectacles, where reputable stores like GoldLion and OwnDays who sometimes offer such deals could be reached.

JioLah! will be also be moving towards a future where deals are curated by not just web scrappers, but also by our user base as well. This will allow users to be able to take advantage of deals that are not openly advertised and obtained from online sources, which can be quite scale substantially depending on the amount of users that are active on JioLah!.

Last but not least, we will be planning support for JioLah! on iOS, so for all those who uses iPhones, fret not! :)

In fact, we are having plans to do some further market research to see the feasibility and usability of JioLah!, and its potential influences.