BassFace

Inspiration

BassFace came from the desire to find new music venues based on genre. After Co-founder Julia Wells listened to EDC artists from 2015 and heard a bunch of trap music she liked, she wanted to find some trap parties in her (and Insomniac's) hometown L.A. but didn't know where to find any or who to ask. Every Friday she'd go to each club's website, look up all the DJ's playing, go to SoundCloud to listen to the tracks of DJ's she didn't recognize, and maybe an hour later she still hadn't found any DJ's playing trap music in her area. Total bummer!

What it does

BassFace to the rescue! BassFace allows you, the user, to filter nearby musical events by genre (represented as hashtags) in real-time, solving Julia's problem. Clicking on an event's map marker brings up additional information about the event with the feature to request an Uber to take the user there. The app can detect if the user is within 50 meters of an event, and if so, will offer targeted promotions to the user from the venue's promoters. A 2.0 version of the app could be expanded to include in-app methods to purchase tickets to the event.

How we built it

BassFace is a mobile-responsive web app built on the .NET 4.6 Framework with a REST WebApi 2.2 architecture. The data access technology is ADO.NET/SQL database/T-SQL stored procedures. The project and its database are hosted on Microsoft Azure and continuously deployed out of GitHub. The Uber ride feature is supported by the Uber API using universal links. The front-end is Angular.js and Razor.

Challenges into which we ran

Building BassFace on a strict time constraint was certainly a challenge; we all met for the first time Friday night, and began coding Saturday morning to present the next day. An additional challenge was the Insomniac API did not feature latitudes/longitudes (a central feature of our idea), so the event organizers gave us permission to make these up. Just for this event, we invented a javascript algorithm that takes the user's latitude/longitude and plots nearby lat/lng's in a spiral around the user; we then assigned these lat/lng's arbitrarily to the events coming back from the Insomniac API. This allowed us to demo the app such that any demo user -- whether in L.A., Las Vegas, New York, or Buenos Aires -- would be able to log in and experience events happening around him/her.

Accomplishments of which we're proud

Designing and engineering a web app that was fully functional over a weekend was rewarding. For four out of our five team members, this was their first hackathon. Three of our five team members just graduated from a program that taught them how to code _ two months ago _ . It was great putting knowledge to practice, and especially a treat to do it for EDM. We were also proud to represent the only female contestants in the L.A. round of pitches.

What we learned

We want to come back next year. :)

What's next for BassFace

The next steps for version 2 will include integration with online ticketing APIs and a robust interface where event promoters can log in and create/update events and subsequent promotions themselves straight into our database. (Right now we are in full control of the database and events/venues therein.)