Birth, I am told, is when a child is born. In my opinion though, the term is not that simple, rather ambiguous. When is an idea born? There are many answers to it. It could be when someone is inspired or later when the idea is sketched or earlier when that someone did some actions which led him to get inspired. For example, in Sir Isaac Newton’s case, was his idea of gravity born when he chose to sit under the apple tree? or was it born when the apple fell on his head? To dodge these questions, I will start my story with a cliché beginning.
Once upon a time, there was a young child in school, who appeared to be invested in his daily activities, however, his brain was preoccupied trying to find a solvable problem the world faced. He was not much of a dreamer, he worked on a schedule, but he did have a major incentive – to make a mark in society. With all of his peers aiming to do the same, the levels of competitiveness and cortisol in his life began to rise. Nevertheless, he was adamant.
Over the course of a few months of his high school first year, he came up with many intuitive, unique and practical ideas. Yet, none of them could quench his thirst to find a better one. His mind only came to rest once he got inspired to make me, Pregus.
Now you readers must be thinking, “Hey! Pregus is solving a solved problem.” Well, amateur advice, never underestimate a teenager who gets lost in thought.
He was puzzled. He knew that this was something that appeared solved. He tried looking for more, but as time passed and as the Google Science Fair drew nearer, he got fatigued. He would spend hours during his commute staring out of his car window, unable to think of anything new. The competition did not need an idea to be 100% original, luckily, but it did want to see significant improvements.
He observed that most of my competitors were made to work only with a small range of products in English speaking countries – that is if they worked at all. Unlike me, they only read barcodes and/or English. The issue with such solutions, is you need a database of all products and you can use it in only a handful of nations. This was where his genius sparked, reigniting his will to win the competition. In order to overcome these drawbacks, he made me such that I can read ingredient labels directly in over 60 languages.
Using OCR and translation, I don’t care if it is written in English or in Japanese. Yes, I need a database too; but unlike the list of products that hit the store, the list of violating ingredients is relatively constant (currently I have over 2000 such ingredients stored). Sorry! Back to the story.
Well, then he started creating me function by function, using Flutter. However, there he encountered a hiccup, which forced him to shift to Ionic. He started all over, his flame grew stronger every milestone he reached.
Fast-forward a few months during which he had to write his examinations, and he launched me for Beta. There were changes to be made (look here: ____). And then he launched me for production on the Play Store! I was born. Wait, maybe.
Comments
Post a Comment