pomibear!

What happens when your not productive >:(
What happens when you are productive :)

Inspiration

9 seconds. The average attention span of a goldfish. Human attention span? 8.25 seconds. In just 25 years, human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds.

In a digital era where attention becomes increasingly commodified and AI barrels towards outperforming humans, practicing and retaining attention becomes crucial to maintain well-being, as a society and prevent further attention span decline.

Current products fail to address user needs, blocking websites completely rather than learning from user behavior and adapting to their needs in order to accurately block the correct sites - this leads users to abandon such tools.

Therefore, we’re building pomibear - a smart, user-first productivity extension that you won’t delete.

What it does

pomibear helps users take control of their productivity by tracking whether the user’s current website is productive or not. If a website is deemed productive, it includes a pomodoro timer so that the user can track their productive time and more sustainably be productive. If the user visits an unproductive website when they aren’t supposed to, then they will get berated with popups and messages that push them to stop being unproductive.

How we built it

pomibear was developed as a Chrome Extension and built using HTML/CSS, Javascript, and a Node JS backend. We did this because we realized that the number one place that people interact with on their computers was on their browsers, and by creating a chrome extension, it would be easily usable and allow for more options in terms of pushing our users to be more productive. We also made use of multiple libraries and api’s in order to enhance and expand the capabilities of our software including fish.audio for dynamic text-to-speech and Claude's LLM models to aid in classification.

Challenges we ran into

Like most programming projects, ours ran into a couple of challenges. Firstly, we recognized that creating all the features was going to be a great challenge, so we paired up and worked on different features that more aligned with our skill sets in order to leverage our strengths to create a better Chrome Extension.

Secondly, when finalizing our project, we realized that merging the code was a much more extensive and harder task than what was expected. In particular, github’s merge would delete vital parts of the project, move some parts into places where they shouldn’t have been, and overall made the project less comprehensible and unable to function. We ended up solving this by manually recreating the required features and using pair programming to more efficiently create the final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the biggest things that we were proud of over the course of the development of pomibear was how we were able to adapt and learn new technologies that we were not familiar with prior to calhacks. At the start of this project, none of us had experience with things like Chrome Extensions and AI Voices, but throughout the development of this project, we were able to both learn these technologies and use them to create a final product we are all proud of.

What we learned

This project taught us all many things in multiple disciplines - from teamwork to understanding web browser extension development. None of us had knowledge of how to develop Extensions at the start of this project, so we had to learn how to develop one from scratch. We ended up realizing that Extensions are like “mini-websites” and were able to use our knowledge of web development and apply them to this project. We also found value in using pair programming techniques to increase the efficiency and polish of the final product. Overall, we found this project to be extremely beneficial and fun, creating something that can help us personally in our day-to-day life.

What's next for pomibear!

We know that pomibear can limit the decline in attention span and caters to users while our competitors do not. We’re certain that users will find us valuable; now, we just need to get the word out. By launching marketing campaigns, we can scale, drawing on the social features of our extension (e.g. the bear) to reel in and retain customers.