Wishbnb is an app that recommends dream vacations based on Pinterest boards, with a twist – these dream trips are meant for terminally ill children and their parents, and the recommendations can be used to create a crowdfunding listing to which others can contribute!
If you love the Make-A-Wish foundation’s mission, you’ll love Wishbnb – an app that takes a Pinterest board and turns it into a dream vacation for terminally or chronically ill children and their families. Children and their families “pin” dream photos to a Pinterest board and Clarifai helps analyze the selections and pick out top destinations based on trends in the photos. Airbnb suggestions also populate with the recommendation, and from there, the listing can be crowdfunded by the community. Check out the live app here!
WHY WE ❤ IT
Our mission at Clarifai is to understand every image and video to improve life, and this app definitely falls under “improve life.” Vacation recommendations from a Pinterest board are super cool, but we love that it didn’t just stop there – turning a fun hack into an amazing tool to help people in need goes the extra mile. Explore the GitHub repo!
HOW YOU DO IT
We caught up with Austin Lubetkin, student at Florida Polytechnic, to talk about his inspiration for Wishbnb.
Clarifai: What inspired your idea for Wishbnb?
Austin: My younger sister Sydney was chronically ill as a child. When she was in the hospital we told her she could have anything she wanted, so we got her Diva the diabetes dog. Looking back I see how that experience brought hope and joy to her life and I wanted to create an app that used AI to bring similar experiences to those less fortunate.
How did you build the app?
I made the whole website with JavaScript. There were some great tutorials on the Clarifai blog that helped me understand the JavaScript API. I then ported the website to native Android and iOS apps with PhoneGap. The entire project was made in 24 hours at WHACK and I won best iOS app.
What was the best part about working with the Clarifai API?
I was really impressed with the accuracy of Clarifai. We were making an app aimed at children so we were testing with cartoons and other similarly abstracted subject matter. Clarifai continually gave accurate and relevant tags we could use to match users to their dream destinations. A great example is a photo we gave of Bambi. Clarifai was able to match it to animals which was one of the relevant tags that helped match a user to Yellowstone National Park.
Thanks for sharing, Austin!
To learn more, check out our documentation and sign-up for a free Clarifai account to start using our API – all it takes is three lines of code to get up and running! We’re super excited to share all the cool things built by our developer community, so don’t forget to tweet @Clarifai to show us your apps.
And give Austin some props in the comments below. Until next time!
