Ideaz

1. My idea: MealMatch

Problem it Solves: Students often struggle with meal planning and eating healthy on a budget. Many end up skipping meals, relying on fast food, or wasting groceries because they can’t finish everything they buy.

Current Market Gap: Food delivery apps focus on convenience but are expensive for daily use. Grocery delivery platforms don’t solve the problem of food waste or planning. What’s missing is a student-friendly platform that balances affordability, nutrition, and convenience.

My Solution: A Smart Meal-Sharing and Planning App for students:

• Community Cook-ups: Students nearby can share home-cooked meals or batch-cook together.

• Leftover Exchange: Post extra portions so others can claim instead of wasting food.

• Meal Planner + Budgeting Tool: Suggests weekly affordable, healthy meal plans based on local grocery prices.

• Nutrition Focus: AI-suggested meals that meet calorie/protein needs for active students.

Who Benefits:

• Students → affordable, healthier meals, less wastage.

• Parents → assurance their kids eat properly.

• Campus Community → stronger bonding over shared meals, reduced food waste.

Business Model:

• Pilot: Free app with basic features.

• Scale-up: Small service fee/commission on shared meals.

• Premium: Meal-prep subscriptions, curated diet plans, discounts with local grocery shops.

Why This Matters to Me: I’ve seen so many students and also myself either waste money on food delivery or struggle with cooking alone. This creates a way to eat healthier, better, cheaper, and together.

Most college students desire to go to activities such as concerts, hackathons, workshops, or matches but are reluctant due to a lack of knowledge of how many other people will be going. This results in missing out on great experiences.

Today, students use WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, or word of mouth. These are either messy, restricted to present circles, or not made for finding new like-minded individuals. Therefore, numerous opportunities for connection are lost.

My vision is to create a campus-exclusive app/ website through which students are able to find events and meet like-minded individuals. Students would log in based on their authenticated university ID for trust and security. It could be like Linkedin/ Facebook but campus exclusive, built only for students, safe, and focused on real campus life..

Core Features

• Event discovery platform for concerts, hackathons, workshops, sports, and fests.
• Smart peer matching to find others interested in the same event.
• Formation of groups (e.g., "first-time hackathoners," "concert buddies").
• Event reminders and alerts.
• Authenticated club/society profiles to post events directly.
• Safety features such as group chat-first and reporting features.
• Future scope: cross-campus collaboration.

Key Features & Technical Approach

• Authentication: Secure login via OAuth using official university email IDs for verification.

• Event Discovery Hub: Events posted by clubs, organizers, or students stored in a centralized event database (SQL/NoSQL backend).

• Recommendation System: A lightweight matching algorithm (collaborative filtering or interest-based clustering) suggests peers with similar event preferences.

• Group Formation & Chat: Real-time chat using WebSockets or Firebase, with default group mode before one-to-one.

• Notifications: Push notifications + email reminders for event updates, powered by a scheduling service.

• Safety & Moderation: Report/block system, admin dashboard for moderators, and machine-learning based flagging for inappropriate content (future).

• Scalability: Microservice architecture so the platform can expand across campuses; cloud-hosted for reliability.

• Future Scope: Integration with calendars (Google/Outlook), gamification (badges for active participants), and analytics dashboards for organizers.

Who Benefits?

• Students: Never miss events, find company easily, make new connections.
• Organizers/Clubs: Improved event attendance and targeted reach.
• Universities: Stronger campus culture, higher student engagement.
• External Partners (future): Ability to promote events directly to students.

This concept is important to me because I've personally missed out on events when I didn't have someone to go with despite wanting to attend. I think addressing this problem will make campus life more social, welcoming, and enjoyable.