symbiArt

Inspiration

All companies start out small. Ours happened to start yesterday, inside a darkened auditorium surrounded by high school students in red shirts who wouldn't let us leave. Not that we wanted to leave anyway, because Chris Hadworth had some interesting things to say to us. Somewhere inside his 50-minute one-way conversation he mentioned that AI would take over the world someday, and at that point we'd have nothing to do but talk about philosophy. And we didn't want people to grow disconnected because of computers, we wanted to connect people with technology. So we started [http://ople.tech]. ![ople], a company designed to do just that.

What it does

ople is a home for socially-oriented apps that focus on encouraging human connections and collaborations.

How we built it

There were a lot of parts that went into this app. We went into it with an idea for an app that involved collaborative storywriting, painting, and composing. Eventually, it evolved into something a lot bigger, and we had a guy working on the website, and three other people shifting between front-end and back-end productions. We got no sleep.

Challenges we ran into

We still wanted to create the app and make it part of ople, but the app involved a database, located on a server, where we wanted to store our information. This was admittedly a little bit out of our depth, but we're also learning at HackBCA, so we got a lot of help from mentors and other hackers on different ways we could go about this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

bumpShare was a program that made meeting new people easier, which we were able to include as part of the ople program of social connection. And then we made symbiArt, which, by the end of the process, represented what we wanted - a collaborative way to create pieces of art, be it literary, visual, or musical.

What we learned

For some of us, this was our first hackathon. At hackathons, you don't get sleep. Collaboration makes individual parts of a team better; each person has strengths and weaknesses, but teamwork allows people to take advantage of each others' strengths and patch up each others' weaknesses.

What's next for ople / symbiArt

We want to focus on social engineering, with aspects of artificial intelligence to further the efficiency of human endeavors. Beyond that, some other stuff.