## Inspiration

Inspired by personal experience of commonly getting separated in groups and knowing how inconvenient and sometimes dangerous it can be, we aimed to create an application that kept people together. We were inspired by how interlinked and connected we are today by our devices and sought to address social issues while using the advancements in decentralized compute and communication. We also wanted to build a user experience that is unique and can be built upon with further iterations and implementations.

## What it does

Huddle employs mesh networking capability to maintain a decentralized network among a small group of people, but can be scaled to many users. By having a mesh network of mobile devices, Huddle manages the proximity of its users. When a user is disconnected, Huddle notifies all of the devices on its network, thereby raising awareness, should someone lose their way.

The best use-case for Huddle is in remote areas where cell-phone signals are unreliable and managing a group can be cumbersome. In a hiking scenario, should a unlucky hiker choose the wrong path or be left behind, Huddle will reduce risks and keep the team together.

## How we built it

Huddle is an Android app built with the RightMesh API. With many cups of coffee, teamwork, brainstorming, help from mentors, team-building exercises, and hours in front of a screen, we produced our first Android app.

## Challenges we ran into

Like most hackathons, our first challenge was deciding on an idea to proceed with. We employed the use of various collaborative and brainstorming techniques, approached various mentors for their input, and eventually we decided on this scalable idea.

As mentioned, none of us developed an Android environment before, so we had a large learning curve to get our environment set-up, developing small applications, and eventually building the app you see today.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our goals was to be able to develop a completed product at the end. Nothing feels better than writing this paragraph after nearly 24 hours of non-stop hacking.

Once again, developing a rather complete Android app without any developer experience was a monumental achievement for us. Learning and stumbling as we go in a hackathon was a unique experience and we are really happy we attended this event, no matter how sleepy this post may seem.

## What we learned

One of the ideas that we gained through this process was organizing and running a rather tightly-knit developing cycle. We gained many skills in both user experience, learning how the Android environment works, and how we make ourselves and our product adaptable to change. Many design changes occured, and it was great to see that changes were still what we wanted and what we wanted to develop.

Aside from the desk experience, we also saw many ideas from other people, different ways of tackling similar problems, and we hope to build upon these ideas in the future.

## What's next for Huddle

We would like to build upon Huddle and explore different ways of using the mesh networking technology to bring people together in meaningful ways, such as social games, getting to know new people close by, and facilitating unique ways of tackling old problems without centralized internet and compute.

Also V2.
## Inspiration

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been extremely crucial in helping establish important political protests in nations such as Egypt during the Arab Spring, and mesh network based platforms hold importance in countries like China where national censorship prevents open communication. In addition to this, people in countries like India have easy access to smart phones because of how cheap android phones have become, but wifi/cellular access still remains expensive.

## What it does

Our project is called Wildfire. Wildfire is a peer to peer social media where users can follow other specific users to receive updates, posts, news articles, and other important information such as weather. The app works completely offline, by transmitting data through a network of other devices. In addition to this, we created a protocol for hubs, which centralizes the ad hoc network to specific locations, allowing mass storage of data on the hubs rather than users phones.

## How we built it

The peer to peer component of the hack uses Android Nearby, which is a protocol that uses hotspots, bluetooth, and sound to transmit messages to phones and hubs that are close to you. Using this SDK, we created a protocol to establish mesh networks between all the devices, and created an algorithm that efficiently transfers information across the network. Also, the hubs were created using android things devices, which can be built using cheap raspberry pis. This provides an advantage over other mesh networking/ad hoc network applications, because our hack uses a combination of persistent storage on the hubs, and ephemeral storage on the actual users' device, to ensure that you can use even devices that do not have a ton of storage capability to connect to a Wildfire network.

## Challenges we ran into

There were a couple of major problems we had to tackle. First of all, our social media is peer to peer, meaning all the data on the network is stored on the phones of users, which would be a problem if we stored ALL the data on EVERY single phone. To solve this problem, we came up with the idea for hubs, which provides centralized storage for data that do not move, lessening the load on each users phone for storage, which is a concern in regions where people might be purchasing phones that are cheaper and have less total storage. In addition to this, we have an intelligent algorithm that tries to predict a given users movement to allow them to act as a messenger between two separate users. This algorithm took a lot of thinking to actually transmit data efficiently, and is something we are extremely proud of.

## What we learned

We learned about a lot of the problems and solutions to the problems that come with working on a distributed system. We tried a bunch of different solutions, such as using distributed elections to decide a leader to establish ground truth, using a hub as a centralized location for data, creating an intelligent content delivery system using messengers, etc.

## What's next for Wildfire

We plan on making the wildfire app, the hub system, and our general p2p protocol open source, and our hope is that other developers can build p2p applications using our system. Also, potential applications for our hack include being able to create Wildfire networks across rural areas to allow quick communication, if end to end encryption is integrated, being able to use it to transmit sensitive information in social movements, and more. Wildfires are fires you cannot control, and so the probabilities for our system are endless.
## Inspiration

We were inspired to take on this project due to recent public interest in crypto currency trading. We wanted to see if we could somehow use our knowledge of the Twitter API and Microsoft Azure to find out more.

## What it does

Crypto Collective aggregates tweets accessed through the Twitter API. It then processes these tweets using Microsoft Azure's text analytics service which returns numerical user sentiment data. This data was then formatted into a user friendly interface and displayed on our website. This will undoubtedly aid users in their cryptocurrency investments.

## How we built it

We built Crypto Collective using Node.Js, Express.Js, Heroku, HTML, CSS, and JQuery. We had to access the Twitter API and process the tweets. Then we had to pass this information to the Microsoft Analytics API which returned valuable user sentiment data. We then used this to determine if a certain cryptocoin was desirable or undesirable. This was then displayed on our site using percentages to convey desirability.

## Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were coordination and API limitations (i.e. requests being limited to a certain amount).

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ability to implement external APIs in combination with the hot topic of cryptocurrencies. Predicting trends in a market that is considered volatile will prove a definite asset to many.

## What we learned

We learned how to implement an express backend server. Implement multiple APIs in one software project. Work together as a team under high pressure situations.

## What's next for Crypto Collective

We plan on expanding by improving our algorithm in order to optimize our platform for accuracy and precision