NameTag

NameTag combats "networking awkwardness" by providing data on who you're talking to, right now. Never go "Hello..X?".

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Our Story & Inspiration

Coming into college, we're told to Network - and we meet new people every day. In the past several weeks, we have become experts in hand-shaking and making small talk. But we're no strangers to *networking awkwardness - Remember moments when you meet someone again but forget their name.

Wanting to see a solution that solved issues for both newbies and professionals in networking, the four of us applied to CalHacks 4.0. While some of us know coding and others of us not at all - we all came together at CubStarts to work on NameTag.

What is NameTag?

Name Tag is an Android application that remembers every person you meet. A prolonged period of near-vicinity contact between phones indicates the app to record data of the person, creating a profile of them in your personalized networking database. When the same device is recorded within vicinity at a later time, the app automatically launches a face and name - a NameTag - so that you know who you're talking to in real time. With NameTag, they'll be no more hesitation of someone's name - go network with confidence!

How we built it & More Info

We used Android Studio as our IDE as it allowed us to test our apps virtually on an Android device. To create the map, we used google maps API and Android's location tracking service. To create the contact list, we used SQLite as our database to store all the contact information. The language was mostly JAVA and XML. In addition to recognizing the information of someone you met, NameTag allows you to relive a list of people you met by time, and allows users to share name and linked in. There is also an option to explore people near you by interests. All users have the ability to edit their profile and sharing information.

Challenges

This is our first hackathon - so challenges were a welcomed experience. While the idea of NameTag came fairly quickly, we were lost at how to start the process of making the app, and had to download many resources that were difficult to use and took a ridiculous long time to download. Due to different device usage, we had trouble sharing our work and making them run in conjunction with one another.

We're proud of:

The fact that we made it to the end! The knowledge we learned and the friends we made will last a century.

What we learned:

An immense amount of information is an understatement. Those of us who had barely any prior coding experience learned to use JAVA, and those of us who took more CS classes learned how to begin the process of making an app. We also took note on preparations needed for hackathons (like downloading software) and the projects we could make - we had no idea that using hardware was a thing, or that the hackathon also gave us opportunities to learn by attending the sponsors' educational events. We're ready to attend our next hackathon!

What's next for NameTag

NameTag doesn't end at CalHacks - First and foremost, we will finish coding it. Making UI a lot easier and visually attractive will be a plus, and we were quite interested in developing a real-time database. We think NameTag is a wonderful idea, and as we take more CS classes or attend hackathons or just spend time on Reddit, we hope to add to the technical foundation of NameTag so we can release it as an actual app in the Android store before the end of our college career.

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