RUMA
Inspiration
My name is Prince Ghosh and my parter, Jack Mousseau and I want to revolutionize they way you park your car. First let me tell you a quick story. This past spring break, three friends and I drove to the Philadelphia auto show. For lunch, we decided we wanted to go to a Shake Shack for lunch about 10 blocks away. We drove to the location, found no empty metered parking spaces, and saw that the only available public parking charged upwards of $40 for the entire day. Now imagine there was someone who lived a block or two down and had an open parking spot at their house, but was out at work for the day. Here we are, paying $40 for public day parking when we only want to use the spot for an hour or two, and here, is a completely feasible empty parking space.
What it does
RUMA is a crowdsourced, share-economy based parking application that allows you as a host to put your unused parking spot up for rent, or for you, as a driver, to rent out those parking spots for a low fee. The application works through a three stage process. Stage one, register yourself as either a host or driver by completing a simple background check. Stage two, as a host you will receive a low signal Gimble proximity beacon that you place anywhere inside your house. When you put your spot up for rent everytime you aren’t using it and a car checks out your spot and pulls into your driveway, the beacon ensures that the correct vehicle is there through RSSID confirmation. As a driver, you enter your final destination, the hours you need the spot for, and a radius you’re willing to park from your destination Stage three, as a driver, you pick the spot that’s most feasible for you, pay with one touch in app, and continue on to your hassle free parking experience. The revenue model behind RUMA is 80/20, the parking spot host gets 80% of each transaction's fee and we, as a corporation recieve the other 20%.
How we built it
RUMA was built primarily through Sketch and Swift and XCode. We initially storyboarded the entire application through Sketch and completed a thorough documentation of how we would like each screen to be for our final product. After that, we built the application with Swift and XCode. In the application, we used both Google Maps' as well as Swift's API's to process our mapping and our payment process. In the future, we hope to integrate Apple Pay to create an even more user friendly experience.
Challenges we ran into
A majority of the challenges we ran into were issues with layout, confirmations, and resetting our Gimble beacon interface. We overcame these issues through extensive debugging, closely studying other open-source software, and going through tutorials and manuals for actions we were confused about.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're extremely proud of the entire application as a whole. From our proprietary pricing algorithm to our astounding user interface, we made an application that's not only functional, but also extremely appeasing.
What we learned
Throughout this Hackathon, we discovered how to create an output algorithm based on different options weightings and what works best to maximize profits while still keeping customers happy. We also learned a lot about user interface design, component design, and proximity tracking and confirmation through the use of the Gimble beacon.
What's next for RUMA
RUMA was first put into proof of concept in the fall of 2015 during Case Western's Blackstone Launchpad Startup Weekend. From there, the concept and its business plan have been entered into competitions and in the winter of 2015 placed 2'nd in pitchU at Case Western Reserve. From here, we have applied to be in the Spartan Challenge, and are looking to raise capital to provide free parking vouchers for firs time users as well as to purchase more Gimble Proximity beacons for our parking spot hosts.
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