Cheap Beer Price Index (CBPI)

[daguar]

Tiny app to crowdsource data on the price of cheap beer at bars.

Simplest version, in my mind, would be a flat HTML5 app focused on mobile browsers that:

• Geolocates the user, and presents bars near them (Yelp, FourSquare, or Factual for this)
  • If not, can put in an address
• After selecting a bar, present dropdown of most common cheap beers (eg in the Bay Area: PBR, Olympia, Hamm's)
  • "Other" option opens a text box for a new beer name
• After beer, select price (most user friendly interface on mobile would probably be 2 dropdowns: dollar amount, and cents in 25c increments)

Probably best to start in a single city and push towards a critical mass of data. Then can build a summary stats dashboard and way to query the data for that city; expand outward from there.

@tmcw might be interested in this:
https://twitter.com/tmcw/status/429389096482394112

Pie-in-the-sky discussion of something vaguely similar is here on BeerAdvocate: http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/crowdsourcing-a-craft-beer-price-database-community-interest.107683/

[tmcw]

What's your (%/chance doing this) in (#/days from now)?

Does the Google Docs approach do read/write? Other options seem like: Parse, GitHub, Firebase...

[daguar]

I'm in a fun-app-sabbatical currently, and this is a fun app. I'm always hesitant to commit on stuff, but it seems like it'd be pretty quick to prototype and I woke up with a sore throat today, so maybe I'll just derp on this while resting in bed. If you have the time/want to take a first go of it, let me know so I don't spin my wheels.

Choice of backend doesn't matter that much. Any of those options work. Part of me was thinking that if a user story would be showing prices near a user, then using the CartoDB SQL API might be a good way to get some of those geo queries doable out-of-the-box.

I actually think some design choices are more important, namely:

1. Do only PBR, or ask for cheapest beer's brand+price?
2. What UX carrot do users get from contributing? (stats dashboard? search for cheap beers nearby? contributor leaderboard? [though that last one requires auth])

I'm a Ruby guy by default, so would probably do a v1 in Sinatra+Postgres on Heroku, but if you really wanna contribute happy to work in (my often poorly-written) Javascript.

[daguar]

Got a little bit of a start here:
https://github.com/daguar/cheap-beer-price-index