Beck

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Inspiration

With a lot of environmental concerns being at the core of people's lifestyles, it is difficult to find one central application to get news and manufacturer information that enables individuals to be informed consumers. Hence, Beck was thought of as a solution to weaponize consumer autonomy and create the opportunity for users to act on their beliefs.

What it does

Beck is a phone application that aims to increase consumer autonomy by allowing users to scan item bar codes to access manufacturers' ESG scores to make environmentally informed purchases. It is aimed at letting users especially effectively shop at grocery stores and supermarkets. It also gives access to news articles on climate, weather, vegetarian, and related topics to stay up to date on correct events in these topics.

How we built it

React Native and Expo were used as the base frameworks for developing the application. We thought there was no need for a separate backend because of the minimal nature of the app so the functionalities that fetched data from yahoo-finance, bardodelookup.com, and newsapi are built into the front end with JavaScript axios calls.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the right APIs to get the ESG ratings in usable formats was a challenge. A lot of the APIs had formats that made it difficult to get access to these said values from their outputs. Also, bringing together all the components that we worked on was slightly difficult as the implementation styles of everyone is slightly different.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that all the planned features work together in an application with a coherent aim is very satisfying. The final product we have looks and feels like it is only a few feature tweaks behind from being production ready and the fact that we got to this position over the weekend is impressive.

What we learned

Good data pipelines make the design, implementation, and user experience of the application smoother. Taking that into account before diving into the programming would have saved more time and made the implementation easier than we found it.

What's next for Beck

We first want to add a feature that allows users to find the best ESG rated companies as well as search by company to get the ESG ratings. We want to launch this application and get feedback on what other features can be useful in providing users with useful information that can be informative concerning purchasing from companies.

Built With

• barcodelookup.com
• expo.io
• financialmodelingprep.com
• javascript
• newsapi
• rapidapi
• reactnative
• yahoo-finance