Week 5: External Pitching & Assignment 3 Idea

I thought the ideas pitched to us were interesting. For the INTELLLEX idea, I've actually heard of how painful legal search engines were to use when I was taking Information Retrieval. As for the idea for reaching out to depressed people within NUS, while it had good intentions, it was still a little underdeveloped and felt a bit shaky to implement.

The idea that made me take notice was the treatsure idea of giving away food that is going to be thrown away. You can tell that food waste is slowly gaining publicity as a problem society needs to solve.

 I remember watching a video where fresh produce that doesn't have the normal shapes that we expect, get thrown out and go to waste. However, a startup called Imperfect Produce is taking the produce that grocery stores don't want to sell and packaging it to consumers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4iSrdlOXk).  There was also a woman in India who placed leftovers in a fridge outside her restaurant for anyone to take: http://www.upworthy.com/a-woman-saw-hungry-people-digging-in-her-restaurants-trash-so-she-put-a-fridge-outside .

Just by googling 'food waste startup', I managed to find an article on TEN food waste startups (https://foodtechconnect.com/2015/10/09/10-startups-reducing-food-waste-one-byte-at-a-time/). I didn't even realise there were that many food waste startups out there, or how many people were trying to solve this problem.

I had one thought: 'What if they combine forces instead of spreading out their resources like this?' but I don't think it's feasible considering how logistics-heavy the solutions need to be, and how localised it has to be. So the treatsure idea sounds like it could make a foothold in Singapore.

Although the external ideas were enticing, my group already decided on building a solution for a problem close to our hearts: finding a common time for meetings with group mates. We already feel the need for our app as we tried to set up a meeting time between the 4 of us -- our timetables just clash. XD

We're going to build a mobile interface for NUSMods and allow people to build their timetables as well as easily match free times with their group mates. For this assignment, I'll be working on the frontend together with Nicholette. We're going to learn React and try it out for the first time. I do like learning new things, and React has been something on the list to learn for some time, after Angular.

Learning from assignment 1, I drew out the user interactions and prioritised mobile first. I then drew out all the wireframes, so that it would be easier for me and Nicholette to work together on the UI. Looking forward to learning building something that people will use in the future!