The Market

Inspiration

We got the idea of The Market by noticing that most of the online shopping platforms are not targeted to local and small scale producers, especially farmers. A lot of people have productions that are not of industrial level but very limited. We noticed a lot of these farmers trying to sell their product through stalls in local markets be it in California or Kathmandu, Delhi, or Damascus. Though focused primarily on developing countries, this service could be of use to developed countries alike.

[Update as of September 14, 2020, by Sudeep Neupane]: I realized that a similar idea now has been implemented into a Company, and I am extremely glad about it. Here is the TED talk by entrepreneur Erin Baumgartner, and her mission to the zero food waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4F40SsEFyY I encourage everyone to support her and us, all the participants, wish to see this thriving throughout the world.

What it does

Using the geolocation API, it connects local buyers and sellers within their feasible location. It also detects the product and suggests the market value for the product.

How we built it

To train the model, we labeled a few hundreds of our fruits data by ourselves. We used image processing to train the model. We used google maps API to know the current location of the user and the distance matrix to calculate the distance between the buyer and the seller. Moreover, for the back-end, we used flask framework to create the database model.

Challenges we ran into

We had to label a few hundreds of data ourselves to train the model. Half of the teams are Physics and Maths majors, so we had a wide variety of coding level and experience among our teammates.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having physics majors in the team, we got to collaborated to see how strenuous these two fields are when mixed together. It has, of course, helped us to think beyond physics to see how things work in a tech world. We are really proud of how we pulled off the concept of the project into implementation.