Packket

Inspiration

All of the project teammates have one thing in common: we love traveling! After some brainstorming, we came to the conclusion that even though there are many tools to help us plan a trip, there are no good tools to manage our budget while traveling. One of the teammates, Noam, even uses Excel for managing the traveling budget, which is far from perfect. In addition, not many trip planning tools take the user’s preference into account, and the ones that does don’t do it well enough. With the help of Deutsche Bank, we can utilize the transaction history of the user to provide more personalized suggestions.

Our main inspiration emerged from the vast knowledge that banks such as Deutsche Bank have on people and the magnificent opportunity to turn your bank from a simple money handling tool to a helpful friend!

What it does

Packket is an application that allows the user to plan the perfect vacation, while keeping an eye on the budget. The user gets suggestions for detailed trips, built especially for him. The suggestions are based on the bank transactions data, as well as data from external sources such as TripAdvisor, Booking, Google Weather, etc. During the trip, users can use the application to track their vacation and expenses in real time. This will help them stay within the planned budget during the trip. It also provides trip information that will more likely be your taste of choice.

How we built it

The first step was to sketch our ideas on paper to “feel” our product. Then we built a dummy UI/UX (by using the HTML5, CSS3, JS, and Jquery technologies) based on our sketches. In addition, we set up a server and a domain for us to work on. We had so many interesting ideas to the point that we needed to PIVOT and decided to focus on one main feature: The real time planner. At this point we split the team to Front-end, Back-end (PHP), API research and marketing (presentation). After a couple of hours the foundations for Packket app were ready and we made our first BackEnd-FrontEnd collaboration. Then, we had to connect with other APIs. After a summary from our API researcher we decided to use the services of the following APIs: Google Maps , Open Weather Map, Foursquare (attractions finder), and obviously Deutsche Bank. We’ve combined all APIs with the system and ran consistency tests. When everything was set in motion we started developing the machine learning methods that will be used to create the most attractive trip for each user.

Challenges we ran into

We also ran into a couple of technical challenges:

We had many features in mind, and very limited time, so we couldn’t implement them all. We had to decide which features are more important, and which ones will have to be dropped from the initial stage and wait for later. This decision wasn’t simple.
It’s an expected challenge, but working non-stop for a long time is quite exhausting and sometimes everybody needs to be awake and fully focused in order to make an important decision about the product.
Integrating different services APIs is tricky, and they all are different in some aspects.
While testing API integration, we were banned a couple of times due to high access rate. This was frustrating, and slowed us down. Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very satisfied with our result. In less than 48 hours, we built a prototype which is very close to the real thing that we planned. The user’s expenses are being tracked in real time based on the actual bank transactions of the user. In addition, even though it wasn’t easy, we finally made all of the API integrations work together, which is very satisfying. And most importantly we are very proud of our team work! everybody gave all they had to this project - their skills, their talent, and their hearts. We had hours on hours of non stop work, all of which followed by constant discussions and no arguments between us. We think that the combination of our talents, motivation, and team work has lead us to create so much in such little time.

What we learned

We learned to work more efficiently as a team, and to better utilize each other’s advantages and skills. Each of us has learned about the specific part that they worked on (from the program infrastructure to the marketing plan), and shared some of that knowledge with the rest of the team. Also during the hackathon, we learned a lot about other cultures of people around us (we know it’s not a part of the main focus, but it was very meaningful for us!).

What's next for Packket

Packket has just begun its way of gathering happier and more relaxed travelers! So…

Step 1: Collect as much user feedback as soon as possible to get the user’s opinion on how to improve Packket’s user experience even more!
Step 2: Get more data from travels through the app and get the Packket community growing.
Step 3: The more data we have, the better our matching algorithms work - so as our data bank grows we will refine our machine learning algorithms to achieve faster and more accurate results for Packket users.
Step 4: Hire! We are looking for talented engineers, designers, coders, and marketing people to keep Packket growing. So if you love traveling and think you’re fit - we want you!
Step 5: Develop more new and cool features for the app. For example, planning a trip with friends to include places that would fit both you and your friends on the same trip!
Step 6: Take over the world ;) (just kidding…!)