IAP 2009 Activity: Mobile Application Competition

Building Mobile Cloud based Applications for Connected Consumption

Final Presentations

Location: Wiesner Room, 2nd Floor, MIT Media Lab
Date/Time: Jan 30, 2009 (Friday), 2-4 pm

Prizes

  • Free iPhone and 1 year of iPhone service for each Award.
  • Intuit Award: Invitation to Mountain View Head Quarters to present to Silicon Valley VC's
  • Bank of America Award: Invitation to Charlotte Head Quarters and 1 year of iPhone service

Judges

Various members of the industry and academia will judge your ideas.

Schedule

Location: 32-144, Time: 10 AM-12 PM. Required sessions are in bold. The Tutorials are optional. Subscribe to Class Calendar for details. Note changes in class rooms for different days.

  • Jan 7, 10 am - 11 am (Room 32-144): Introduction to Connected Consumption, introduction, idea sharing/team networking [slides]
  • Jan 7, 11 am - noon (Room 32-144): Managing mobile application projects (Dave Mitchell, ConnectedBits Inc) [slides]
  • Jan 8, 10 am - noon (Room 32-144): Intuit Web Services (Small business transactions, Quickbase, Credit Card transactions) [slides]
  • Jan 9, 10 am - 11 am (Room 32-144): Android UI/XML Programming (An Li)
  • Jan 9, 11 am - noon (Room 32-144): SVN/django (Charles Amick)[slides]
  • Jan 14, 10 am - noon (Room 36-112): Discussion/Feedback, Lab - iPhone Intuit Integration (Ted Benson)
  • Jan 15, 10 am - 11 am (Room 32-144): Advanced Django (Pol Ypodimatopolis)[slides]
  • Jan 15, 11 am - noon (Room 32-144): Publish Subscribe, Presence (Charles Amick)[slides]
  • Jan 16, 10 am - 11 am (Room 32-144): Android Networking (An Li), iPhone Advanced UI (Dawei)
  • Jan 16, 11 am - noon (Room 32-144): Wesabe API (Kwan Lee)
  • January 21: Discussion/Feedback, Core Graphics[slides]
  • January 22: iPhone Core Graphics Tutorial[slides][Sample Code]
  • January 28: Discussion/Feedback, Lab
  • January 30: Final presentation/Award Ceremony

Enroll

In order to enroll, please sign up at link.

Description

You will be learning about developing applications on mobile phones related to commerce, small businesses, publish/subscribe systems, location aware applications, applications for financial decision making and behavioral changes and much more.

Student teams choose to design and implement mobile and supporting web applications related to

  • financial/nonfinancial transactions
  • financial health monitoring
  • predictive markets for products
  • real time financial decision making
  • context sensitive visualization of financial data
  • location sensitive retail shopping discounts
  • mobile auctions
  • social network of consumers and businesses
  • diffusion of word of mouth, opinions
  • novel ways to visualize financial data
  • paperless transactions

on the Apple iPhone or Android under the guidance of MIT Media lab staff and students and application developers from industry partners Bank of America, Intuit, ConnectedBits (a local mobile apps company).

The idea of the course is to conduct an abbreviated version of the 12 unit 6.087 project class to introduce participants to techniques and platforms for building mobile applications. The course will help participants choose a simple project in the area of Connected Consumption. Introduce participants to iPhone SDK, Android SDK, provide introductions to cloud based services for data storage and server side processing: Google App Engine, Intuit's Small Business Development Platform.

Data sets representing consumption behaviors of individuals and small businesses will be available and provided by industry partners for participants to prototype with. Guidance will be provided on how to work as a team on projects and pitch your prototype in effective and engaging ways.

Each team will work closely with a Media Lab student who is an experienced iPhone applications developer. Mentors are participating from Bank of America, Intuit, and Connected Bits (a local mobile apps company). There will also be participation with technical experts from Intuit who will advise on how to connect mobile apps to Intuit's cloud base services for authentication, billing, credit card processing and data access.

Available platforms

We will be supporting projects on the following platforms:

  • iPhone, Android
  • Google App Engine, django
  • Intuit Developer Platform

We'll supply the iPhones or iPods, G1's, and development license for apple and development accounts for Intuit's cloud services.

For iPhone Development Novices

The following IAP course will be offered preceding this activity: Intro to iPhone Application Development which will be helpful to get you familiar with iPhone SDK.

Some Project Ideas

  • Peer share: We live in a society where it is often taboo to share personal financial information. But how can our individual spending and savings habits be opened up to social scrutiny? What kinds of mobile sharing methods can we develop to help discipline people's everyday financial behavior? What kind of social networks can be created and deployed to track and provide just-in-time personal feedback as we negotiate the increasingly complex pressures of everyday consumerism?
  • Time-money tradeoff: How much is your time worth? App to help people make decisions about whether they should wait in line or not, outsource a task or not.