Katapult | Devpost

Inspiration

We noticed that advertisements could be put on anything, even restroom hand-dryers. From this thought, we did some research and realized the current traditional billboard model is not very compatible with a digital society. We decided we wanted to put advertisements in places no other billboard companies were considering.

What it does

Katapult connects property owners to advertisers, maximizing profit for clients through low expenses. Katapult is a asset-sharing platform, meaning we have effectively no costs other than servers and legal. We are also a smart marketplace meaning we use Machine Learning to create the most effective advertising plan based on the advertiser's business requests. We understand that from the perspective of the ad-space owners, a lot of building owners are incentivized to join our product because it gives them more control over their assets, and maximizes their revenue, allowing them to move past the worries surrounding maintenance and utility costs of their buildings.

How we built it

We used a Django web framework, coding multiple applications that serve multiple purposes for our project:

We created 3 applications in our program - main, buy, and sell. Combining the capabilities of these three applications allows us to streamline the user interaction process with an easy-to-use UI.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of challenges during the creation of our program: in a number of different aspects. Using Django, we were given so many different default files per package, that it was difficult in certain circumstances which file needed to be debugged or worked with. Additionally, obtaining and processing the data was a challenge, because, without proper backing, we were only able to use low-quality, open-source data.

We used Live Share through VS Code for the majority of this project, and adapting to VS Code having written mainly in Atom was difficult at first, but was a challenge that we managed to overcome with a little assistance from Jim at Microsoft.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From our perspective, this project is a feat beyond anything we imagined we were capable of. Coming into this hackathon, none of us had any clue as to the extent of what we were going to create and the notion that we are life after 24 hours of pain-staking development is a notion I find difficult to wrap my head around.

What we learned

Having completed this project, we gained a better grasp of what it truly means to collaborate and divvy up the work for a project. We were slightly disorganized coming into this hackathon, but after a couple of hours of working we realized the correct path for us, following it until the final buzzer. We are extremely proud of what we're able to show for this period of time, and we are looking forward to improving it in the future.