TextNet

The SMS-Powered Internet

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Inspiration

Spencer was suffering from food poisoning in Death Valley during Winter Break. He spent a night unable to sleep and nervous about diagnosing his sickness without mobile internet in the area. The inability to search for potential ailments or possible advice left Spencer wishing he could view a trimmed-down widespread internet. Death Valley has barely any mobile data but is teeming with SMS-enabled zones. Being able to text his mom, Spencer learned how to lay and sleep more comfortably but was left with an urge to give others the ability to find answers using SMS.

What it does

TextNet is a revolutionary app which leverages substantial development of SMS-enabled towers around the world to provide SMS internet to everyone. By sending and receiving requests through SMS, TextNet is able to compress, parse, and display friendly and helpful snippets from the internet without connection.

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How we built it

We used Google Cloud as the foundation for SMS-powered search. Through deploying a Flask application with Google Cloud API, we could integrate easily with Twilio and Android. Twilio allowed us to text numbers using Python to send and receive SMS data. Finally, we parsed the data to be displayed on an app in a readable format. What emerged was TextNet. The SMS-Powered Search Engine.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created the SMS Search App. Our compression algorithms lossily compress text to 94-95% while maintaining meaning. We summarize with bag-of-word machine learning and further compress with zstandard algorithms. Our text compression is cutting-edge and when coupled with the reach of SMS, our app will provide thousands affordable internet.

What's next for TextNet

We hope to get funding for this app to assist its rise in popularity. With enough users, block-chain connections will become feasible, allowing for more compression, html loading, and much more! The future of connected devices acting as a network is strong and currently, the wide-ranging SMS network is the most effective way to gain this huge and necessary user-base. The future of affordable knowledge without ads, IP slow-downs, and overcharges is being paved by the future of TextNet.

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