Social Networks for Buildings (SNB)

Social Networks for Buildings (SNB) Mobile and Web App

Entry for The Stamford Hackathon, Stamford CT 20 Feb 2016

The Idea

The idea is to make micro-social networks for building-sized co-located communities, and include the building as both a persona and participant. Any posts made in the building are automatically aggrated to the building's account and then automatically routed to the correct location or individual in the building (e.g. facilities management, building event coordinators, etc.) and some (most) are also available to all the network members (while in the building).

How It Works

So this service uses geolocation and a geo-fence to determine the user's location and the building they are linked to. We tried to use the Estimote and Blue Bite beacons to use the Eddystone URL protocol, which would allow use of the web app or navigation to the buildings web site automatically when the user was within range on a single beacon. We could not get our hardware to work for this over the weekend, but did find some useful software for this (see Resources below).

How It Was Built

This mobile application was built with the sweet Ionic Framework (Angular.js/JavaScript/CSS/HTML5) and uses the Google FireBase service for authentication and cloud data storage.

Live Demos

Apple iPhone and any Android smartphones (or tablets) can run the mobile SNB app from the free Ionic View app (available on "the App stores"), using the preview code: ba453561

And the latest APK can be found here: https://rink.hockeyapp.net/apps/db7d8bf896ac4e93968e39c1423f5726

Live web app version of SNB can be found here: http://capricious-stream.surge.sh

The GitHub repository for the web app is here: https://github.com/mkobar/snb-social-web

Currently the building is hard-coded to the Stamford Innovation Center building

(175 Atlantic Street Stamford, CT 06901 - View Map).