This just in; kids that go to MIT are really F-ing smart. I just saw seven Android applications that have been developed over the short span of four months — with very little (if any) money — as part of a class called “Building Mobile Applications with Android”. It was a lot like most college presentations, except that HTC, Google, Verizon, Sprint, and the press don’t usually show up.
Hit the jump for a peek at the applications.
loco
Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation.
You can search within the application for, say, “party” and see a bunch of events that have been tagged by your friends with “party,” and what’s even more cool is that you can view real-time photos of the event in progress, assuming the people there are taking photos with their Android phones. So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town.
I’m done with “scenes” since I’m now married, but this would have been cool for College Doug. He was a pretty awesome dude.
Flare
Flare is a geolocation tracking system aimed at small business owners who want to keep tabs on their employees. The demonstration given was that of a pizza delivery boy who has five pizzas to deliver. If a couple of customers call up to ask why they haven’t gotten their pizza yet, the delivery guy’s manager can use any web-based system to check out the location of his driver.
What’s more, he can give an ID number and PIN code to the customers, which the customers can then use to track the pizza guy themselves. Thankfully, that PIN code can be set to expire after a certain amount of time and/or each customer’s specific tracking privileges can be cut off by the manager or the driver himself.
GeoLife
GeoLife is very, very cool — perfect for a guy like me. It’s basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.
It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day.
One reporter remarked that a similar idea is being developed by a company on the West Coast but he wouldn’t name names. So this might be a hot area. I’d use it for sure.
RE:Public
Guess what? Kids at MIT are smart and some of them are pretty funny, too. I thought that RE:Public was a brilliantly funny idea.
It’s basically a location-based social networking service for finding new friends once you get tired of your old ones. You connect locally based on a radius that you feed into the program and meet people based on dovetailing interests.
The real brilliance lies in the fact that you can rate and tag each friend and the system automatically updates each friend’s score based on how much time you spend near each other. So after a while, you can see who your “top friends” are.
Tags that are given to people on the network can be voted up and down by other users, so if one person tags me as “jerk”, all my real friends can vote that tag far enough down that it eventually disappears. That, or I’ll find out that my friends actually think I’m a jerk and I can start finding new friends. It’s the circle of life!
Locale (winner of the Android Project – top 50)
Locale actually just finished in the top 50 applications for Google’s Android Project competition, so congratulations to the team. Nice work, indeed.
Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You basically set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart. That kind of stuff.
There’s already an API available for other developers to tap into Locale to set up profiles and settings for events and itineraries. My idea would be to have the phone’s mic take samples of ambient sound and then automatically adjust the phone’s ringer volume based on how loud or quiet your surroundings are. That’s just me, though.
KEI
KEI has been a dream of mine for some time. It’s basically a Bluetooth key for all your stuff. In this early version, it was demonstrated as an automatic car starter and unlocker so you don’t have to try to find your car keys all the time.
It’s built so that multiple people can control the same car and/or multiple cars can be controlled by a single phone. Security is handled via 128-bit encryption and there will be an administrative interface so you can cut your ex-lover’s access off when the two of you break up.
There’s a relatively simple module that gets installed in your car, much like existing remote starter systems work. Future KEI systems would also read diagnostic information from your car as well.
snap
Snap is very cool — I would absolutely use it. It’s kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.
So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.
If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.
Gosh, sorry to come off as rude, but these applications really aren’t anything special, in fact a lot of the other submissions are far superior to these. Everyone loves a feel-good story about MIT whiz kids though, huh.
Wow, that was quite rude. I commend you on your ability to label something as “nothing special” based on half a screenshot and a paragraph of description.
I sincerely hope you actually produced something that is unanimously agreed to be “something special,” which is the only qualification to label something else as “nothing special.”
I think these applications are no better than work produced by non-MIT individuals in the ADC, in fact I’d also go on to say that many were more innovative/polished than these.
I’m not tied to any of the entires. Just an honest independent observation.
You have not seen these applications, played around with them, or really found out how they work. You know next to nothing about how polished they are.
Your opinion is poorly informed, and smacks of arrogance. I’m not sure what axe you have to grind with MIT “whiz kids,” but you don’t even have enough information to make a sound judgment.
Re: Mark
I agree somewhat, except that students took this class along with a normal courseload @ MIT. They didn’t have 80 hours/week to spend on these apps. It was more like 10-15 hours/week for about 10 weeks.
Compare that with some of the other entries, which are simply astounding! Take enkin for example (http://www.enkin.net). These guys are serious–you might even conclude that they’re doing this part of their PhD research. If they’re working on that 60-80 hours a week for say 8 months, there’s no way the MIT class can compete. The quality and sophistication of their product blows away everything in this blog by an order of magnitude.
I think the point of the demo was to give a glimpse at what someone might see on Android in the future, in addition to showing off the capabilities of the platform.
On the point of “whiz kids”, I can say out of the class of 25 or so, there were two really outstanding hackers (both PhD students in CS). One did this ridiculous drag and drop thing for Locale, and other wrote a webserver in Java from scratch (maybe PhD students have more time on their hands, I don’t know). The rest of the kids are what you’d pretty much find at any other engineering school.
True there were a good number of companies which dedicated their resources towards this project. I’d say though that the majority of entrants were individual professionals working on projects in their spare time. I’ll argue that it took a lot more for these people to work on a project outside their full time job than for college students.
Anyway the point I am trying to make is that I think a lot of these people that worked pretty hard on their projects are getting zero coverage post-ADC I. When I read this article I just felt a bit frustrated that there are some pretty wonderful apps submitted and are being left in the dark, while these projects from MIT are being talked about. Of course everyone has their own idea of what makes a great application, but I didn’t think these applications from MIT were anything special compared to some of the other submissions I’ve seen.
I regret writing my original post in a disrespectful way, I didn’t mean anything by it personally.
Thanks
Hey Mark,
No offense taken, I actually agree very much with your sentiments. Throw on an “MIT” to the end of anything and heads start turning for no particular reason (I see this effect on reddit headlines every week).
As a practical matter, I think it’s hard for bloggers such as Doug to go out of their way to search for apps that are interesting, travel there, and interview the developers and watch demos. He probably figured that if he came to this MIT presentation where 7 teams were demoing, it would be a worthwhile use of his time since he would expect the apps to be of some baseline quality (and breadth), especially if Hal Abelson was putting his name behind it.
So in the end, yes, it’s not fair :(. I just think it’s a more efficient use of his time to go to these group presentations, where he’ll have more material to blog about. Anyways, the really good apps will be recognized by the ADC Top 50, which will receive far much more pub than this blog post.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have made any comment on them at all since I haven’t installed each one and used them myself, I only used the information the article provided to draw a conclusion based on other articles/videos I have seen of other ADC submissions.
So I’m one of the members of the Locale team, and I must say that I agree with Mark on most of his points. There are *definitely* tons and tons of better apps out there which haven’t gotten the media coverage they deserve. I’d also stress the point someone else made that we are doing this on top of a “normal MIT course load” which I must say is far more time consuming and stressful than a full-time job. (god, I hope so) But you know what, this is exactly the reason we pay 40k a year and bust our asses to go to MIT, instead of just learning all the stuff on our own. Attach ‘MIT’ to anything, and people are guaranteed to pay attention – that’s almost worth more than the actual degree.
am a recent MBA (not from any of the big name schools). am looking for tech people who can help me implement a mobile phone idea into a neat cool android application….
i don’t know the tech part…
any leads in MIT or anywhere else ?
thanx
These look like excellent apps. Innovative and very useful. Great work!
this looks pretty cool
There are only a few Android Developers available. I must say that these are good apps and they’ve done a wonderful job.
Sam Shaw
dreamworldsol.com