## Inspiration

Thinking back to going to the mall every weekend to hang out with friends, I realized that ecommerce can sometimes be a tiresome and lonely time. Furthermore shopping online tends to give you a disconnected feeling where you end up mindlessly shopping and completely overshooting your budget.

Taking these in mind, we wanted to create a more personal and social ecommerce experience. Hence ShopPal has born: an AI cartoon character that interacted with the user, asking them casual questions, telling jokes, and making unique comments based on the search history and type of websites the user was looking for in order to replicate real life conversations.

## What it does

ShopPal is a chrome browser extension, that is easily accessible in the chrome web extension tabs. Our code featured an animated character that one of our team members designed and created from scratch who would appear and disappear across the extension popup, spouting messages to it's users.

## How we built it

None of our three members had very much coding experience, so we stuck together and created the framework of the site using html and CSS, however after that was finished, we all branched out and tried to create our own unique part of the browser extension, searching for some new knowledge that we could learn and implement in order to create a more accessible and enjoyable website.

## Challenges we ran into

The undeniable, daunting fact that we are incredibly inexperienced had nothing on our unwavering determination to climb this mountain of a project. Being the first hackathon for all of our team members, many things were surprising. We faced many problems, including time management, underdeveloped technical skills, and especially a lack of sleep.

## What we learned and Accomplishments that we're proud of

Admittedly, we knew next to nothing before participating in this hackathon. While there is only so much one can learn in 36 hours, we definitely made the most of our time. Not only did we gain tons of valuable experience with a few different languages, we learned valuable skills and concepts which we will be sure to apply in the future. While there were some bumps in the road, they were more learning experience than challenge. One thing we struggled with was time management, but now we know where we went wrong, and how we can do better in our next event.

## What's next for ShopPal

After creating a simple AI and persona, we want to delve deeper into this character that we had built and truly push it to it's limits. We would aspire to create a robot that gets to know people based on their online habits and how they interact with the AI. ShopPal would store this information and compare it with other data gathered in order to learn more about online habits and find new creative ways to be useful and innovative.
## Inspiration

As students who just moved to San Francisco for their freshman year, we have experienced how dangerous it is sometimes to walk around the city, especially near Mission and Tenderloin areas. Since day 1, we are told to be careful and walk in groups to be safe. Statistically, there were reported more than 1000 crimes in those two regions during September 2019 according to sanfranciscopolice.org. But how can we help our community to feel safer while being also time-efficient (we are students after all)? In order to solve this problem within not only our community but also for the whole city, we have worked during this weekend on the Safe Walk web app.
## Inspiration

We were inspired by the resilience of freelancers, particularly creative designers, during the pandemic. As students, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and not value our own work. We wanted to empower emerging designers and remind them of what we can do with a little bit of courage. And support.

## What it does

Bossify is a mobile app that cleverly helps students adjust their design fees. It focuses on equitable upfront pay, which in turn increases the amount of money saved. This can be put towards an emergency fund. On the other side, clients can receive high-quality, reliable work. The platform has a transparent rating system making it easy to find quality freelancers.

It's a win-win situation.

## How we built it

We got together as a team the first night to hammer out ideas. This was our second idea, and everyone on the team loved it. We all pitched in ideas for product strategy. Afterwards, we divided the work into two parts - 1) Userflows, UI Design, & Prototype; 2) Writing and Testing the Algorithm.

For the design, Figma was the main software used. The designers (Lori and Janice) used a mix iOS components and icons for speed. Stock images were taken from Unsplash and Pexels. After quickly drafting the storyboards, we created a rapid prototype. Finally, the pitch deck was made to synthesize our ideas.

For the code, Android studio was the main software used. The developers (Eunice and Zoe) together implemented the back and front-end of the MVP (minimum viable product), where Zoe developed the intelligent price prediction model in Tensorflow, and deployed the trained model on the mobile application.

## Challenges we ran into

One challenge was not having the appropriate data immediately available, which was needed to create the algorithm. On the first night, it was a challenge to quickly research and determine the types of information/factors that contribute to design fees. We had to cap off our research time to figure out the design and algorithm.

There were also technical limitations, where our team had to determine the best way to integrate the prototype with the front-end and back-end. As there was limited time and after consulting with the hackathon mentor, the developers decided to aim for the MVP instead of spending too much time and energy on turning the prototype to a real front-end. It was also difficult to integrate the machine learning algorithm to our mini app's backend, mainly because we don't have any experience with implement machine learning algorithm in java, especially as part of the back-end of a mobile app.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how cohesive the project reads. As the first covid hackathon for all the team members, we were still able to communicate well and put our synergies together.

## What we learned

Although a simple platform with minimal pages, we learned that it was still possible to create an impactful app. We also learned the importance of making a plan and time line before we start, which helped us keep track of our progress and allows us to use our time more strategically.

## What's next for Bossify

Making partnerships to incentivize clients to use Bossify! #fairpayforfreelancers