BARIS YESUGEY: Wow.
I love that demo and excited to introduce the next one.
QRegister, an app that removes the need for physical paper
receipts upon transactions and instead encourages the use
of QR codes for users to virtually keep
track of all their receipts.
QRegister was created with Firebase and Flutter.
Welcome the creators, Alkim, Deniz, Humeyra, and Murat
from Middle East Technical University in Turkey.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to QRegister,
the register of the future.
Our team consists of curious, aspiring engineering students
driven to save the planet and improve
everyday life with technology.
Did you know that the majority of people
think that paper receipts are obsolete?
According to our survey of hundreds of respondents,
most of the users think that paper receipts are ineffective,
outdated, and hard to keep track of.
Moreover, for paper receipt's production, masses of trees
are cut down, multitudes of water and oil is wasted,
excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and solid waste
is generated.
Keep in mind that these data are for each year in the United
States only.
Imagine the vast amount of damage paper receipts
are causing all around the world.
Moreover, 93% of paper receipts are unrecyclable and composed
of harmful chemicals which cause diseases, including cancer.
What if there is a simple solution
by using only QR codes to save our trees, our planet,
our home?
Introducing QRegister.
Our screen is based on Raspberry Pi.
It generates QR codes for the purchase
according to the inventory files.
These QR codes contain all the data in an encrypted form
where we use the special hashing system
to store data in one string.
The QR code is then scanned on our mobile app developed
with Flutter, which enables us to build
our application faster and create a beautiful UI/UX
design.
QRegister automatically scans the QR code
and asks for confirmation.
After the scanning is complete, receipt details
will be on the profile page, listed by dates
and labeled with supermarket icons
for glancing through quickly.
The swipe action archives receipts for easy access.
QRegister continues functioning successfully in offline mode.
We store the encrypted receipt data in the local storage.
And once you connect to the internet,
we transfer it into Firebase.
We upgraded by integrating a barcode scanner, which
scans items rapidly.
We want QRegister to be effortlessly implementable
globally.
So as an alternative, cashiers can also connect a webcam
to scan barcodes.
In the future, we will use the camera
to recognize the items without scanning barcodes.
Lastly, we are honored to announce
that QRegister was selected to be supported by our university.
It is anticipated that our first register will
be open in our college's merch store
and meet users in the summer of 2021.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ERICA HANSON: Hi.
Hi, Sami.
Hi, Team QRegister.
It's good to see you.
We're all over the world right now.
This is great.
Hey, Sami.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
And I know that you have a couple
of questions for the team.
SAMI KIZILIBASH: I do.
Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Sami.
I look after Google's Global Accelerator and Experts
programs and I also look after our developer programs
in Asia-Pacific, and I'm based in Singapore.
I was very interested in this startup.
Actually, I founded a startup in this space about 10 years ago.
And I have to say I'm much more confident about the approach
that you're taking.
Far more scalable with the QR codes.
I do have a couple questions for you.
The first one that I have is, who
is your target market over the next two to three years,
after you complete this pilot on your campus?
And how large is that market?
And just a quick follow-up to that
is, what type of technical features
do you see yourselves growing into or expanding
to be able to get more retailers onto your platform?
HUMEYRA BODUR: So I can take that question.
Our aim with QRegister in the beginning
was to actually make it widely available
so that even a small establishment,
like a kiosk around your street corner,
could be able to use it.
So we made our software so that it was easily implementable,
cheap, and fast.
And every establishment that owns the barcode scanner
can easily implement QRegister by just owning a touchscreen.
We also believe that our customers will
have an easy time adapting to QRegister since we have chosen
to use QR codes, and QR codes have been really popular
and used in the last year due to COVID.
So we can say, in general, that our target in the far future
is any person who uses a smartphone or any establishment
who uses receipts at any price of their sales process.
But for now, our main target will
be young adults that are between the ages of 18 and 25
that are actually environmentally conscious.
So, for that reason, we believe that choosing our test area
as our campus was a good choice in order to test this strategy.
ALKIM DOMEKE: Yes.
And about the technical features,
our eventual aim is to be one of the top POS
systems in the market.
And right now, QRegister solely focuses on receipt information.
So adding diversified payment methods
is one of our priorities.
And secondly, QRegister has automatic inventory control
that helps the retailers immensely.
This is a unique feature as the usual checkout systems are not
in touch with the inventory.
This will ease the workload of the retailers.
And thirdly, we are thinking about implementing an object
detection instead of scanning barcodes for faster checkout,
because faster checkout equals a better shopping experience
and happier customers.
And also, we have some hashing systems.
That's to provide a secure purchase at QRegister.
And lastly, we will have some form of gamification system,
which will be a coupon reward system so
that the customers will prefer the system and the application
and the retailer more often.
And they will return to the retailer
to receive their rewards so that the small businesses will excel
much easily with QRegister.
SAMI KIZILIBASH: Thank you.
Thank you both so much.
That makes a lot of sense.
My next question has a little bit
to do with the integrity of your database.
Now, you mentioned that your system can function even
when it goes offline.
And I was just wondering, is there
any impact on how the transactions are
going to be accounted for, particularly
on the retailer's side, if there's a loss of connection?
DENIZ KARAKAY: OK.
So thank you for the question.
So before jumping into data integrity,
I would like to say that our project consists
of two main parts.
The first one is the mobile application.
That is for the customer's usage.
And the second one is the Raspberry Pi
and the touchscreen that we use for the retailers.
So, as you mentioned in the question,
we added an offline mode for people
who have problems with their internet connection linked
to shopping.
For data integrity, we know that the retailer's side has
a stable internet connection.
So while we are generating receipts and converting them
into QR codes, we actually send our data to our servers,
to cloud and especially we use Firebase Firestore.
Therefore, loss of connectivity on the consumer's side
does not constitute a problem on the retailer's part.
MURAT KAS: Also, about the data integrity
on the mobile application of ours,
although we display all the information about the receipts,
we insert only the necessary sequence
information in the local storage, like a receipt diary.
Because as Deniz already mentioned before, at that time,
on the register's side, their receipt
has already been uploaded to Firebase Firestore.
Afterwards, we just match the receipt with the user
when they're back online.
Our only request from our customers
is that just do not delete the app before going back online,
because that is like the electronic equivalent
of throwing a receipt away.
Yes.
Even if that happens, the retailers
are in no way affected because their data is automatically
just backed up anyway.
SAMI KIZILIBASH: Great.
Thank you.
ERICA HANSON: Thanks.
And now, we're going to pull in an audience question.
So Dan has a question.
Why use QRegister instead of the email receipts
most merchants currently offer?
HUMEYRA BODUR: We can say that people nowadays
are using mobile phones quite often
and not everyone uses emails.
And QRegister's initial aim was to actually make it
that everyone could be able to use it and at any time.
For example, if you go to a market,
you can't really ask them to give you an email receipt
and that would not be really practical at any moment.
But if you have it in your mobile phone,
you can just scan it and have it seen right away.
And it also has the advantage of being able to work offline
so that, even if you do not have an internet connection,
you can just scan it and it will come to your mobile app.
ALKIM DOMEKE: I also want to add onto that.
Because QRegister not only works as a receipt system,
it also gives you a way to organize and help you
with your purchases.
For example, when you are using email receipts, most of them
get lost behind your usual day-to-day receipts.
And we want to put a stop on that,
and we keep all your receipts organized in our application
so that you can quickly search through all of your market
inventory searches.
All of them are stored in our application,
so it's much easier to find what you are looking for.
And we also offer some machine learning algorithms
in the future so that customers will
be able to analyze their spending habits, too.
ERICA HANSON: Nice.
That's great.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
And, Sami, did you have any final comments?
SAMI KIZILIBASH: Oh, I love this idea.
Honestly, bring QRegister to Singapore.
I'll be the first one to sign up.
The one bit of advice that I recommend
is keep in mind both sides of the users
you have on your platform.
Right?
You've got your consumers, and you've got your retailers.
And you want to make sure that they're both engaged,
whether it's loyalty program or insights on their consumer
behavior.
So that as you continue to flesh out
your products and the different features,
they'll stay loyal and be retained.
But congrats on all the progress so far.
Very exciting.
ERICA HANSON: Yeah.
Great work.
ALKIM DOMEKE: Thanks.
ERICA HANSON: Thanks so much for being here.
Bye, everyone.
ALKIM DOMEKE: Thank you for having us.
HUMEYRA BODUR: Bye.