Guys, this is Abishek from Timebender. The makers behind the ATM bot. This is not a product showcase, but a need of the hour in India.
You must have heard about demonetisation in India (Govt. has demonetised higher value currencies like INR 1000 & INR 500). Though the govt. has clear & legible reasons to do that, the fallout has been massive as there’s no cash available in ATM’s and people’s livelihood has been affected.
Background : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In...
Govt. has imposed strict limits on the amount of cash which can be withdrawn at a time from an ATM or Bank, hence there are long queues at ATM’s and Banks. Most of the ATM’s are dry.
Fallout : http://mashable.com/2016/11/16/i...
As a citizen, I fully support the reasons for the govt. to indulge in this immediate action but at the same time in-order to fulfil the moral responsibility to my fellow citizens we decided to do our part by providing them with technology to ease their sufferings.
ATMBot : As locating a nearby ATM with cash has become very difficult, we decided to provide a bot which does just that. Though Google maps & other bots already provide nearby ATM location, there were none which provided cash availability status at the time which we started with the build. There is no centralised API’s available for ATM data & other crowd sourced solutions for ATM mapping with cash were spreadsheets with dozen manually entered data and websites which did the same with fewer data entry points.
Design choice : We wanted a minimalist approach for obvious reasons. Instead of typing, we decided to keep buttons. In-fact the user has to click just two buttons to either enter (or) receive ATM data.
Messenger : We chose messenger as there are significant number of population using it and has the necessary API’s to serve our purpose. More over if it is on messenger it would be easier for us to spread the word on Facebook, which has a large user base from India.
Adoption : We are campaigning for adoption using local startup community and volunteers working to do their part to help others during this crisis. We tried doing a PR, but doing so without spending large cash (irony) has been difficult so far. We’re a startup and we cannot afford a budget for promotion on this project. I request your help in anyways possible to get this to the people of India urgently (can work anywhere else). If at least one of them who withdraw cash from an ATM in a 60 minute interval use ATMBot, it can help dozens of others from the same area.
Open source : In order to release the ATMBot at the closest time possible, we used our proprietary middleware & backend. Those are the one’s which we are betting our future on as a bootstrapped startup from a little town (former village) in southern India. So the source can’t be released without affecting our livelihood. But we would be able to release the ATM data which we get through ATMBot to the community, we do not store any user data.
Any help is much appreciated.
Robot icon credit : Zlatko Najdenovski (http://www.flaticon.com/authors/...) under flat icon license - http://file000.flaticon.com/down...
ATM icon credit : http://www.flaticon.com/authors/... under flat icon license - http://file000.flaticon.com/down...
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