Inspiration I love coworking spaces. I don't mean the food and drinks offered or the table tennis or football tables. What I like most about these places is the productive creative working athmosphere and the possibility for people to meet and inspire each other. The problem of coworking spaces is that they are static and people who travel a lot cannot have the same experience at another place. Also, if you only have 2 hours in between work and meetings you don’t want to go all the way to a coworking office
What it does CoWork24 is a mobile app that allows you to create coworking spaces whereever you are on the go. Whether you are sitting in a cafe, a library or a park you can let people join you for having a productive working atmosphere. It allows people who do not want to work alone on their individual projects to find a creative environment to work in on demand. With CoWork24 people never have to work alone anymore. The data collected about people's favourite places and what time they usually go there can be used for businesses to target them and offer individualized special offers tailored to their needs. We are planning on using a combination of NYC Open Data, MongoDB and Clarifai to work on our recommender system for the relevance of the special offers.
How I built it? Ha came up with the idea. He also worked as the product manager and helped in designing the product vision together with Keven who is our UI Designer. Kevin and Omar created the interfaces for the screens. Omar also helped Vikram and Yuta with the program logic and the coding work. Vikram led the dev team and put everything together in the end.
Challenges I ran into We hard difficulties getting the Google Maps API run with our use case and also had some other minor complications but we were never stuck without knowing where to go.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of We got to know each other shorly before the hack started and pulled through together creating this amazing app that actually has real business potential.
What I learned I learned how to focus on each person's strengths and skills and how to best work together as a team to accomplish a common goal
What's next for CoWork24 Vikram is going to take this idea and our product as the start for his final project in his Master studies. He is going to improve it, add a backend and finally publish it. Ha is going to help as an advisor for Vikram to bounce ideas off. Possibly we are going to all have a giant party together once he is done and passes his Masters with flying colors.