Whats trending

Business Model Canvas

Inspiration

We wanted to build something that could help people escape from their current circles and get a broader view regarding what is currently taking place in different countries around the world. A lot of people these days are moving away from traditional social media platforms; we wanted to build a free, easy-to-use, no registration needed platform for these people.

What it does

It pulls data from a number of different platforms (such as Youtube & Twitter) and displays the aggregated data to the user in an easy-to-view format. The user can conveniently select a country of their choice from an interactive map which displays all of the supported regions.

How I built it

The application was developed in react for the front-end and .net core for the backend. The application is utilizing a SQL Server database for data storage. Microsoft Azure was selected for cloud capabilities and deployment.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest technical challenge we ran into was limited queries associated with the public API's; for example, the youtube API only allows a number of requests to be made per hour. To get around this limit, we created our own database to store the public data; we also created recurring jobs which pull and save the necessary data on our behalf. This meant that we could ensure that user's of our platform query our own database rather than query the public API's directly per user, thus ensuring no limits were breached.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our team was very proud that we were able to meet our MVP which we defined at the beginning of the event. To have a fully functional, public website at the end of the event is quite an achievement we believe. To be able to successfully integrate data from a number of different public platforms is something we are all proud of.

What I learned

We learned how to work in a well-structured, well-disciplined team that was capable of successfully managing tasks and collaborating with one another.

What's next for What's trending

We will most certainly continue working on this application to make further improvements. Some of our most sought after improvements are: integrate more data sources, improve our data storage capabilities, create more value for customers, improve the overall application design, create our own domain, add in filter capabilities and create an analytics page.