A class at MIT built some mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system and presented them today. CrunchGear’s own superblogger Doug Aamoth reports on the seven apps—loco, Flare, GeoLife, Re:public, Locale, Kei, and snap—that he saw. Below is a slightly edited version of the original post:
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.
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 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.
RE:Public
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 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.
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.
snap
Snap is 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.
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Awesome concepts. Can’t wait to see what else is developed with this.
Dugg at http://digg.com/software/Sneak.....Out_of_MIT
Locale seems pretty brilliant.
Scene 1:
Android’s gain is iPhone’s loss…
Oh wait, the iPhone can’t lose. It’s invincible.
Scene 2:
Who said the east coast can’t produce great Web 2.0/Mobile 2.0 ideas…
Scene 3:
Why doesn’t MIT drop their old school “Industrial Liaison” dept. and setup a Y Combinator-like VC on campus?
Mike is right, local/mobile is poised to really take off. If only the bottle/networks would cooperate…
marc, i think theyre mainly missing the ‘hype’ of ycombinator. theres certainly a building, maybe even more than one where the suites are dotted with tiny startups that have spun off from other projects. presumably invested in by local angels/VCs and the university itself. ive no idea if its centrally coordinated into some quarterly roundup or what..
@carmen
I haven’t walked by there since ‘97, so it’s great to hear there is more prolific activity now.
They’ve always had spin-offs that were partly invested in by the university. They’ve just never had the know-how/skill set to turn those into big YouTube-like exits. I mean look at Stanford …
Almost everything of note in the Web 2.0 space has come out of Silicon Valley.
This looks awesome!
GeoLife looks perfect for my business. I love GE, this will take it mobile.
Eric -
Great write up. Love seeing the stuff going on at the ground level.
KEI would indeed be a dream come true. It’s also what every start-up strives to be; a service that makes your life easier and with a obvious business model(s): Sign up OEMs and offer KEI through their subscriptions services, and/or charge direct to the user.
I want KEI now!
Thanks,
Jaafer
Many of these are already the kind of killer apps that could kill the iphone for many (including me).
Fingers crossed for a good form factor
Re: Smart
I talked to Rich Miner, who is one of the founders of Android. He currently has an Android enabled-phone which looks dead sexy. If that’s what they’re really like, I think you’ll be very pleased with the form factor
Kevin
Hmm… I think Android is kind of silly but the ideas behind these apps are pretty solid. Cool to see college students creating real mobile apps…
I guess ‘loco’ will create some buzz !!
These applications are great. Now we just need one decent phone to be the flag bearer
(and that’s affordable pls^ the iphone is a great phone, but the fact that it’s such a lock-in [to both handset & contract] doesn’t do the customer any favours).
These mobile apps will revolutionnize the world.
Somebody please combine loco and snap for realtime 24h 7d party ratings. Simply click thumbs up on the phone when you are at a cool party. Display realtime party recommendations on a map.
Make RE:public work in annonymous mode and filtering out your google connect and facebook connect contact lists to meet new friends to do certain social activities such as sports, partying, table football, watching movies and all other types of social activities.
Upload pictures and videos to the realtime loco snap party tracker to document the coolness of the event.
Use something like Flare to make a peer-to-peer package delivery service. If you are going someplace, the system tells you if there is a package that you could take, if you take it and drop it off you get paid.
Put Flare on every bus, train and metro so you can see the public traffic on a map and it calculates if you need to walk faster to catch the train. Any car driver can also instantly become a peer-to-peer taxi. Once you have entered your destination, told it how many empty seats are in your car, it tells you if you can pick someone up, drop them off and get paid like a taxi.
cool apps. i love google and firefox.
This should be spelled “peek”, not “peak”.
I guess ‘loco’ will create some buzz in the market.
Great applications! But I’m curious how patent violations will be handled?
Some of the ideas used in these great apps are not new to me and I know there are several patents out there within the area of location services and social networking for mobile handsets.
We just have to wish that Google will help with some kind of protection so that these developers don’t get into any problems and can continue producing great apps like this!
@Per
TechCrunch would gain huge favor with the community if they were to support the fight against software patents.
….
Good apps. More interesting than what iPhone has. However, I will not automatically assume these kind of apps will make android successful — the reason is these apps all drain battery like hell, and the android simulator does not include anything that enables you to test how much battery an application will consume. So until we can prove that the android hardware can support these apps without having to recharge the battery every 30 minutes, I wont spell iPhone’s death.
iPhone took a different approach. It tries to make sure third party apps will not drain so much battery that will render the phone useless. I suspect as they get more and more comfortable with battery consumption, they will open up their platform more.
@bong
So you’re inadvertently implying that Firefox takes more battery power than Safari….
Obviously, not true.
Apple wants to CONTROL. Period. That’s the basis of their business model. Not openness.
Berkeley just finished a class like this, too, but it was a user interface class. Too bad that Android is such a mess to work with.
Finally one step closer to what’s been available for many years in Asian countries…
Video of Loco’s presentation: http://web.mit.edu/jchang1/Pub.....0Loco.mpeg
MIT Android Team !
Congratulations ! Cool stuff, all of you guys have brilliant ideas !!!
Loco and Re: Public teams !, contact us at tunewiki at gmail dot com , we have an idea how to cooperate !
lets show how android can create a new culture of cooperation between startups.
The TuneWiki Team (..also at the top 50)
YouTube video of Loco: http://youtube.com/watch?v=AcSpqjxFUtA
If anyone has familiarity with coding mobile apps and is looking for a new project email me, justin@singlefinmedia.com. Please include links to where sample apps you’ve worked on can be found. Thanks.
Check out GeoLife’s presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE8rJJwfStI
Here’s the link to RE:Public’s presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3fEpeXpezw
We are working on the concept of “location enhanced browsing on mobile” which can enable to create LBS services (and maybe similar apps like here) as easy as write xhtml page.
It is free, in java and works on usual mobile phones (MIDP2.0 required). Documented examples - show on map, twittering location included.
Sorry for this self posting - but I suppose the same topic and push to openess can be interesting. Any feedback on concept is interesting.
http://www.locify.com
I think you better have a look at all the android games wave coming at us.
Its all here in http://www.androgamez.com
I got into MIT this year. I am so excited.