Mind-Your-Business

• GIF

  Sample search

Inspiration

We want to help people new to business find out the best possible location in their area.

• Compare with existing businesses in the same category, to find out windows of opportunity.
• For example, all the good businesses could be concentrated in a particular geographic area, opening up the possibility of establishing your business in a new area.
• Combine existing business information with local demographic information such as population, number of households, age groups etc. to offer better targetting of locations.

What it does

• The tools makes heavy use of the Yelp API and Google Maps API to get information of businesses in a particular area.
• The user has the option to select any location with autocomplete feature.
• Based on the Yelp API user can select one of the following target business categories: Bars, Restaurants, Hospitals, Doctors, Education, Fitness, Tours etc. There are around 800-1000 business categories available in the Yelp API, hence this model can be easily extended to include all types of businesses.
• The search parameters are then queried with the Yelp API, and return a list of geotagged business with their approval ratings.
• These ratings are then used to present the result in the form of a heatmap.
• To compare across different areas, a draggable rectangle is available which gives the average rating and the number of businesses it encompasses at any time.

How we built it

• The interface to Yelp is available in the form of an API built using Flask and Python. This is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance.
• The front end is completely written using javascript, and the following javascript libraries from Google Maps: maps, heatmap etc.

Challenges we ran into

• We could not add the demographic information because of delay in securing api keys to access census information. This would have doubled the value we offer to the user.
• We wasted a lot of time in setting up the API with Flask on EC2.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• This is a good idea to help new business owners deciding on the most profitable location.

What we learned

• Hackathon's are fun!
• There's no substitute to a good night's sleep.
• Yelp API has a ton of useful information
• Google Maps is fun

What's next for Mind-Your-Business

• Integrate census information
• Introduce best location prediction based on various features

Built With

• flask
• google-maps
• html
• javascript
• python
• yelp