Jotspot

Inspiration

Jotspot was created after a few hours of independent brainstorm and integrating a sum total of ideas. With the principle of "It's not who does it first, but who does it better", Jotspot's inspiration mainly comes from the ambitious of college students to use technology to advance their endeavors and ambitions within the world.

What it does

Hotspot allows users to "broadcast" an event at a specific geo-location. When various broadcast, whether they relate to each other or just happen to be in the same city, start to cluster together, they form what's called a Hotspot, a collective of a broadcast. Broadcast has the ability to be as simple as college club events, raves, speaker events, or for complex situations, such as natural disasters, evacuations, high-crime-rate areas, and more. The flexibility of Broadcast allows it to be more versatile than any Snapchat Story or Twitter Post.

How I built it

Jotspot was built using Swift 3.0 and designed using mock-ups from Figma Design Tool. Pre/Concept code was written in Java and then translated into Swift. Corners were cut for the sake of time but still allowed for Jotspot's ability to be revamped with far better coding structure.

Challenges I ran into

Firebase was our first time using the no-SQL database (aside from Realm) and was a nightmare due to our inexperience. Took us nearly an hour and an experienced mentor to be able to get the values from our nested database. Really cost us some valuable time. Another obstacle was using Mapkit for the first time. Most of the hack was generally reading up on docs to understand how to do a certain task.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Collaborating together to come up with this idea and using our talents to bring it somewhat to life. Some teams get consumed in arguments and infighting over ideas or unexpected obstacles. We stuck together and created a project that we have the fullest extent on working ours beyond HACKMIT. Conquering new skills in Swift and database structuring was a really something we're happy about.

What I learned

A lot. A LOT. The majority of this hack was a learning experience, form figuring out iOS' MapKit SDK, figuring out how the hell to use Firebase, to seeing how one space can really mess up parking JSON. There's not a single one of us leaving here today with a list full of new things we learning.

What's next for Jotspot

Designing Jotspot for iOS was more of a compromise due to team experience than it was the reality of its potential. JotSpot's purpose really shines as a full structure API that's available on all platforms. When we get back to Pace, we plan on mapping out Jotspot properly and focus on the aspects that we found were lacking due to its constraints here at HACKMIT. The application can obviously benefit from machine learning integration to better create hotspot clusters. We also plan on making it user-friendly to local business, allowing them to promote deals and events that they wouldn't be able to physically or financially.

We also believe that Jotspot can be a favorable application in regards to Natural Disasters reporting, Machine Learning prediction, and other avenues that relate to exploring Big Data and its interpretation. While we failed to create a fully functional application here, we expect Jotspot to live up to the expectations we want it to be.

Built With

• figma
• swift