Ramble

Inspiration

Living in New York City means being surrounded by thousands of events, communities, small businesses, and resources, yet it can still be surprisingly difficult to discover what is right around the corner. Most platforms are great at telling us where to go when we already know what we are looking for, but not at encouraging spontaneous exploration.

We wanted to make discovering your city feel exciting again. Inspired by the feeling of getting a side quest in a game, we created Ramble to turn everyday exploration into an opportunity to find new places, experiences, and communities.

What it does

Ramble turns exploring your city into a real-life side quest.

Users select their interests and explore personalized recommendations around them, from local events and hidden gems to farmers markets, community resources, cultural spaces, and small businesses.

Our Side Quest feature gives users spontaneous activities that encourage them to actually interact with their city rather than just scroll through recommendations. Users can accept quests, complete them, and keep a history of their adventures.

Ramble also includes neighborhood exploration, personalized discoveries, and longer multi-stop journeys for users who want to spend more time exploring.

How we built it

We built Ramble as a mobile-first web application with a component-based frontend and an interactive map for location-based discovery.

Our data pipeline is designed to combine multiple sources:

NYC Open Data provides civic and community information such as farmers markets, food resources, and other public datasets.
Tavily enables live web discovery for events, activities, and neighborhood information that static datasets may miss.
AI transforms these results into personalized recommendations and Side Quests based on a user's interests, location, and exploration history.

We standardized these different sources into a common discovery format so they can all appear together on the same map and recommendation interface.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was combining information from very different sources. NYC Open Data datasets often have different schemas, while live web results are much less structured.

We also had to think carefully about location. A recommendation is only useful if it is actually close enough for someone to visit, so accurately connecting discoveries, coordinates, map markers, and user location became an important part of our architecture.

Finally, we had to balance our ambitions with the hackathon timeline. We had many ideas for gamification and community features, but focused on creating a strong core exploration experience first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud that Ramble goes beyond being another recommendation or map application.

Instead of simply asking "What's near me?", Ramble asks "What could I do around me right now?"

Our Side Quest system turns real city data into actionable experiences, while our combination of civic data and live web discovery allows us to highlight places and resources that users might otherwise never encounter.

We're also proud of creating an experience that makes civic data feel approachable and fun rather than presenting it as another dataset or dashboard.

What we learned

We learned a lot about combining location-based data from multiple APIs and datasets into one consistent product experience.

We also learned that AI is most useful in Ramble not as a chatbot, but as a layer connecting information to action. Rather than having users talk to an AI assistant, we use AI behind the scenes to understand interests, evaluate discoveries, and turn raw information into experiences people can actually participate in.

Most importantly, we learned how much useful information about NYC already exists—the challenge is making that information discoverable and relevant to the people living around it.

What's next for Ramble

Our next step is to make Ramble feel even more polished, personalized, and social. We want to improve the UI and overall mobile experience, making discovering and completing Side Quests even more intuitive.

We also want to expand our leveling and quest system by generating a much wider variety of unique quests based on a user's interests, location, previous adventures, and neighborhood. As users level up, Ramble could introduce new quest types and encourage them to explore outside their usual routines.

Finally, we want to build a social review system inspired by Beli and Letterboxd, where users can rate and review places, quests, and experiences they discover through Ramble. Over time, users could build a personal log of their adventures, see recommendations from friends, and discover experiences through the broader Ramble community.

Ultimately, we want Ramble to evolve from a city discovery tool into a personalized exploration community that gives people a reason to experience more of the world around them.