TheSpot

Social platform for finding and learning about events in real-time

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Inspiration

Last week. Friday night. It's party night after my finals are over. Like anyone would, we went out to have fun - and after paying to get into a nice venue, the inside was a DUD! Not a single person was at the event, and the night became dull instantly. This is a problem many of face daily. We do not know how an event, party, bar or restaurant is until we get there. Say no more - the solutions is here. The world's FIRST real time event rating system, which acts as a social media and event platform.

What it does

TheSpot is for you to pick the best spot and to go to. TheSpot is a revolutionary platform where hosts can enter their events, and guests can check out the scene before getting to the event. Guests can enter private chat rooms only open to those going to the events, where people at the event and those on their way can communicate. An important security feature is when there is an emergency, the site map of the event get's messaged to all the members of the event which contains instructions on what to do in emergency settings (active shooter) and find the nearest open exits

How I built it

The project is built on the MEAN stack with some alterations. We are using firebase for storage and backend, and Angular 4 for the UI. We are using node and express for the middleware service. We are hosting our messaging platform, which is SHA256 Hash encrypted on a secure AWS Ec2 server. The services work together to enable instant messaging and event tracking.

Challenges I ran into

4 of the 6 team did not have prior Angular experience, and we still managed to build a BEAUTIFUL UI, where all the members contributed on at least one major component of the UI. The other challenge was that in order to get the EC2 configured and enabled for secure messaging we had to create a SSL certificate - and deploy that on our box in a matter of hours. Lastly, the integration of firebase with Angular was also a little bit tricky.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We all soo proud that we were able to complete both the User interface and the Backend. With only 20 hours to build this project, we were able to learn new technologies and implement a product which we plan on continuing and taking to market.

What I learned

Working under pressure. We all worked under continuous pressure for 20 hours. In the midst of our work there was a branch collision on Github and we had to speak about how to maintain our branch for the rest of the time.

What's next for TheSpot

Have it before a regularly used platform that many people can use on a daily basis. To think strategy and how this idea can be validated further and what are the most important features to keep for our release version. TheSpot plans to capitalize on profits through business advertisements, and sponsoring featured businesses in the area. It also plans to have a payment system for event, when events are created - for both personal and public events. TheSpot will truly revolutionize how people plan their events and how people go out and live their lives. Given that 2 of the members hold E-board memberships in major Greek organizations, the next process is to fix bugs and try to beta test this at the social setting at Drexel and Upenn. We have a close tie with the Baiada Institute, and we plan to take this application and pitch it to mentors and investors. We would like to also do more research into this market to understand what are the gaps that need to be filled, and how can the spot fill them. Integrating with social media via Geolocation can also be an option for easily checking into any event.

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