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Sites like Facebook and Twitter have made it incredibly easy to share personal and public events as posts to friends and followers. Sites like Yelp and Foursquare provide user driven data on the best places to go in your area in a particular category. What if you want to know about the best events coming up in your area in a particular category without having to follow a particular business or dig to see if the coolest places are having events around you?
While Facebook and Twitter provide access to many public events, the data they provide can be widespread and hard to access. To see an event easily, you will either have to follow someone who has shared it or follow the business that created it directly. This may lead you to consider following more profiles, however, you will likely be flooded with a tremendous amount of events (and just general posts) that you have no interest in that obscure the potentially enjoyable events. This is all great if you like a decentralized calendar spread around many profiles and even better if you like your calendar to be full of events you have no interest in.
Yelp and Foursquare on the other hand are great for specifying exactly what you are looking for in your area without any bloat but they only tell you about the places you can go, not about what events are happening at those places. It would require a considerable amount of cross referencing to find out if a place that is highly rated has any highly rated events going on.
We all make playlists for our music and share these playlists with friends. We can add singles to playlists, albums to playlists, entire artists to playlists. We can go to our friends profile, see what they are listening to, and even follow their public playlists. We have ways to discover new music from the previous songs that we have played based on genre and what others who have played that music listen to. These concepts can be applied in the exact same way to events.
Businesses already have public calendars and make many posts about events to their social media sites making getting started easy. Users would be able to make event lists from single events, weekly events, or even all the events at a single business or location. They can separate their event lists by what type of events they fill it with like "family friendly" or "date nights". They could also share events that they have actually been to along with photos and posts. Searching and discovery would be filterable so you can find new events just like you would when finding new music. Users will be able to interact with each other and share their event lists with each other. Optionally, you could find others who are interested in the same events as you and follow their public lists. Businesses will have profiles showcasing their events for users to discuss and follow. They should also be able to integrate with their existing social media sites to avoid duplicating data. It would also be nice to share a public API so users could populate their own sites' calendars with the same info.
This would be a cohesive solution to finding events that you enjoy without the extra bloat associated with current social media platforms and the extra time associated with finding it across multiple pages and sites.
The primary target audience would be businesses that host events and people who enjoy getting out and going to events. Businesses that have events span multiple different categories. There are venues with bands that play every night and then there are bars that might have trivia every tuesday. Businesses might have one event a year or something every single night. No matter what, if a business is having an event, they want people to know about it. And there are certainly people that want to know about it. There is no particular type of person that this would target as everyone is looking for something different to do. If you are tired of having to search through hundreds of posts and profiles just to find something to do for the weekend, this would be an option. On the other hand, if you want to have something to do everyday all managed in one place and built off of what others have discovered that are similar to your interests, this application would also work well.
The data sources that I plan to use for this project include Facebook's Event API, Instagrams User API, and Google's Map API to name a few.
- Facebook Events: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/event/
- Useful for things like linking events and importing events from Facebook
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/developer/
- Useful for adding pictures to events from existing social media
- Google Maps: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/
- Required for showing where an event is located as well as finding other events in an area
The video game industry is an enormous market pulling in over 18.4bn USD a year. While solo games are making quite the return recently, the most played games remain online. With online games, you typically will want to play with friends, or at the very least, a group of like minded people. There is nothing more frustrating to a gamer than having a teammate that ruins their experience while playing and that can come in a lot of shapes and forms; different levels of play, different playstyles, too immature over voice communications, not reliable, or even sometimes hostility. The list is neverending. Most games have tried to combat this by having some collective called something along the lines of "guild", "club", "clan", "party", etc. These are all great but are typically limited to a single game. The idea of taking the process out of the game exists but is still generally focused on the single game and eliminating the shortcomings of the in game browsers and managers. There currently exists no multi-game browser for finding like minded players and managing teams, schedules, games, etc. that also allows you to follow some of you favorite players, teams, and games.
A multi-game team managing/following application.
This application would have two main functions between users and the collectives. Users would primarily be able to find groups that they want to be a part of so that they can join or apply based on criteria such as playstyle, games, schedule, and then some game specific criteria such as faction. They would be able to interact with their groups based on permissions admins have given them. They would also be able to follow players or groups that they want updates for like the Overwatch League teams to watch things like highlights, how-tos, stats, and streams from sites like Twitch. Users would also be able to make all of the aforementioned posts.
Groups would be made out of members with a certain number of admins. These admins would be able to post for the group as they would for their own profiles as well as manage members and requests when recruiting. Groups will have their own schedules, basic information, and ways to follow them. They would be able to show progress in games that they link with.
Gamers. People who enjoy playing games that are played online. Playing with like minded people gives gamers the opportunity to make the most out of their time playing. It also gives a localized spot to find more information on games and improve your own performance by sharing playstles and videos with others.
There are many games with many APIs so I will only give a small subset here:
- Twitch: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/
- For adding streams to your page
- Discord: https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/intro
- For sharing discord server information and showing a chat log
- Battle.net: https://dev.battle.net/
- Contains APIs for Blizzard games which include Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone
- PUBG: https://developer.playbattlegrounds.com/
- Contains APIs for Playerunkown's Battlegrounds
This is actually my father's business which he is the only employee of (other than myself sometimes). The problem is that his website is not a reflection of how hard he works. While it it primarily informational, it does double as an online store for heat exchangers and associated equipment such as industrial fans. It currently lacks an intuitive interface and administration is not managed on the site itself.
Update the website to reflect the hard work my father and the business have done in the past ten years. Create a more inviting and more easily findable site that can get you to the product or information you are looking for in fewer clicks. Add a local administration page so that updates can be performed quickly by the sole employee of the business.
The target audience are those that require heat exchangers which ranges between industrial salt mines for ventilation and custom intercoolers for BMWs. The audience may be individuals or companies which allows for multiple user types. user communication would not be as much in the forefront but could be expanded with ways to communicate on product pages or with each other about recent purchases. Some stocked items are not custom built and are off the shelf products from other companies so allowing those companies to create profiles would create a way for direct communication with the OEMs.
This requires very little outside of the business but as it is a store it could take advantage of payment systems created by Paypal and Google Pay.