CarrierPigeon

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  Landing page

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  Entering a hashtag

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  Viewing the feed for the entered hashtag

Inspiration

• The power of social media in world crises
• Human rights: access to the internet without censorship.

What it does

• Allows users to view top tweets from Twitter from desired keywords, hashtags, and topics.
• Feeds are generated and displayed without accessing the local internet, thus bypassing government blockage of social media in foreign countries
• Feeds are generated and displayed without the use of the mobile phone's 4G/LTE/Data

How we built it

• We built it using NodeJS, hosted on Cloud9.
• The NodeJS program gathered information from the SMS messages received, and sends SMS messages out with information.
• We used Android studio to implement the mobile application
• Twilio API was used to send and receive text messages
• Twitter API was used to access Twitter.

Challenges we ran into

• Setting up an environment through AWS / Heroku / Azure
• Inexeperienced team - it was our first hackathon for most of us!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The application runs through our use cases, is demoable, and met our goals!
• The app works with all data/4G/LTE off, and without using the internet!

What we learned

• SO MUCH about servers, frontend and backend development, mobile development, android development, NodeJS, etc etc.

What's next for CarrierPigeon

• Allow users to share information in our app, and share that information with other users in a bulletin-board style notification system
• Integration with other social media services that provide developer API's
• Improved performance

Built With

• android-studio
• cloud9
• java
• node.js
• twilio
• twitter