Datability | Devpost

Entering Into Challenges/Learning Facts About the Plant
Has all of the users snaps and their location displayed on map with pin drops
Analysis & Dashboard
Map of all of the businesses received data from users

Inspiration

Pranit and Sashank are a part of Boy Scouts, and we both spend a lot of time helping our community and giving back. We have had personal accounts with the organizations we aim to help. Krish is also a local advocate for sustainability, he regularly looks for opportunities to help.

We saw a need and we thought of a cool way to process and collect data and wanted to build it out. Who wouldn’t want to be earning Money and feeling like you're playing a game?

What it does

Datability is an app and web platform that gamifies and incentivizes crowdsourcing data. The problem we are trying to solve is simple: sustainable organizations struggle to receive the data they need because it is either scattered, expensive, or extremely difficult to access. Without this data, organizations can’t take action where their efforts make the most difference.

Datability works by allowing organizations to request data and we crowdsource data from users by gamifying and incentivizing the process. Organizations give data requests and give us information on what data they want to capture and from where. Next, users in the geofence of the challenge are eligible to participate and can upload data they collect. In turn they get points and real money. At the end of it, organizations get actionable data and users get to compete with each other and make real money all while helping the environment.

Our business model is simple too, the top 3 contributing users of a challenge get 35% of the pot and the rest is proportionality distributed to all contributors using this formula. We take a small cut from the payouts offered by Organizers and we want to give 50% of our profits back to sustainable efforts

How we built it

We built 2 platforms. One geared toward organizations and the other toward the public. And an IOS App for the users, and the web app for non-profits/business.

Our tech stack included Swift, Swift UI, Firebase, Google Cloud APIs, Plant Identification, HuggingFace ML Models, NLP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Bootstrap, Apexcharst, Google Maps API, Apple Maps

On the organization side, we streamlined the onboarding process and added a smooth Stripe Setup. Using multithreading we can get immediate API responses and dynamic updating on the screen. We allow organizations to enable geofencing and location boundaries. On top of that we provide advanced analytics with Google Maps APIs as well as data aggregations and collections. We also have the cool feature of exporting all the data into a JSON format.

On the consumer side, we were able to create an easy-to-use application that allowed easy interaction and understanding of all of its features. We were able to create NLP based descriptions for each of the plants to make sure everyone learns something from sustainability. All of the user data/images/coordinates were uploaded to our database to make sure that the web app could easily interact with that data too.

Challenges we ran into

This was our 4th Hackathon, but first time competing on a college campus. We went through multiple phases of ideation and several technical challenges. For example, when we were first discussing how to implement a psp (payment service provider) into our platform we exhaustively went through all the potential options before landing back on stripe as the optimal solution for us. Though these discussions could be seemingly tedious at times, it taught us a great deal on why planning is incredibly important, especially in computer science.

The lack of sleep is also always a challenge :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a working product that with a few tweaks would be beta launch ready. That means we wrote a whole lot of code this weekend and are happy to see the final product.

We’re proud of making a full stack iOS & Web application that works with various parts of Machine Learning and other APIs to deliver an impactful yet clean user interface. In addition, we are proud that the iOS and the web app seamlessly work together with no difficulties to make the overall platform better.

What we learned

We learned a whole lot. From several technical challenges and countless debugging hours, we learned the ins and outs of Swift/Swift UI, integrating stripe into web payments and mobile payouts, Google Maps API…

What's next for Datability

Over the weekend we loved the process of building and ideating over Datability. We want to continue so we are going to start a Beta Launch in just 2 weeks. Yes that’s right we are doing a beta launch in two weeks in the Bay Area community.

We want to continue iterating on our tech and get it ready for scale. We look forward to what’s next.