The Communitech Apps Factory was created to help ideas be realized. Our initial model was to hire four co-op students for four months and build four applications. This term's efforts culminated on Wednesday, August 23rd with our very first Demo Day, hosted at the Communitech Hub.
One of those ideas is the idea of the Apps Factory itself. As the term started we asked members of our community, organizations and people both, for ideas they had that needed to be developed. The community responded with 16 excellent ideas which were pared down into a shortlist of three, with an additional slot for a application to be developed specifically for Communitech.
Scavenger
The first application we started developing we call "Scavenger". It was suggested and specified by Homick Labs, a member of the Accelerator Program. Scavenger is a game, a Scavenger Hunt, specifically used to make tours of University Campuses more engaging to the students who visit.
There are two major components of Scavenger, a server-side component written in Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database that allows the administrators - called Campus Builders - to identify specific Places on campus. These Places are often times historically or culturally significant landmarks that the Campus Builders wish to emphasize. Places can be chained together into a Tour, and at each Place one or more Challenges can be created.
Players access the game through their iOS devices. After registering they can see the Places and Tours available to them. As they complete Challenges Players receive Experience Points which allows them to gain levels and access additional Places, Tours and Challenges.
Mobile Apparatus for Temporality Research ("MATR")
At about the same time as development of Scavenger was started, we began working on MATR (http://matr.spurse.org), described by its Idea Sponsor - the creative consulting and design collaborative spurse - as a new sense organ for hearing time.
The Apps Factory implemented the iOS and Android clients, and assisted in collection and preparation of a variety of data used by the MATR Analysis Core.
MATR will be released in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area's (CAFKA, http://cafka.org) biennial program CAFKA.11. Survive. Resist. (http://cafka.org/exhibitions/cafka11-0)
Cancer Blaster
Cancer Blaster is an entirely new game for mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, designed to assist Cancer patients undergoing treatment in several ways. First there is the game itself. Players destroy cancer cells directly by touch and indirectly using a variety of weapons. The number of cells destroyed is added to a cumulative total. This provides short term entertainment during active therapy sessions as well as long-term positive mindset.
Additionally, Cancer Blaster engages a patient's support network. Players can choose to send their scores - along with a personal message - to anyone else. That score is added to the recipient's total and more importantly the recipient knows their loved ones are thinking of them.
Waterloo Tech Jobs - Mobile
WaterlooTechJobs (http://waterlootechjobs.com) is the best resource in Waterloo Region for tech sector jobs. Our goal with this project is to allow users to be notified when postings that match their preferences are available, to bring the jobs to the users instead of forcing the users to search for jobs.
The Waterloo Tech Jobs project has been broken into two phases. First, and our primary focus this term, is a server-side tool that collects data from the primary site, compares it against user preferences and pushes notifications to the client devices. We've also made significant headway into the second phase of the project, the client interface.
Developed using the PhoneGap platform for widest accessibility the client will allow users to control the jobs they hear about, as well as be notified when new jobs are available.
Things That Worked
The single best thing about this term was the team. Because of the way co-op hiring cycles work, they were all hired before I was, which was an interesting prospect. I lucked out. These guys worked independently and delivered high quality code, handled communications with Idea Sponsors and generally took complete ownership over the implementation of all the projects.
The Ideas and their Sponsors were simply outstanding. We developed applications for a variety of platforms, web and mobile, native and cross-platform. The ideas ranged from games to standard applications to client/server applications. There is almost no hard line between "Web Application" and "Mobile Application" anymore.
Next Time
We're only halfway through this pilot phase and we're already thinking of things we can do to help more people develop ideas. Over the course of this term I was lucky enough to speak with dozens of people who have amazing things just waiting to be built and we're going to be expanding our services to help people we wouldn't have been able to using the current model.
We're also going to be building four entirely new prototypes (not including the client side of Waterloo Tech Jobs) for four entirely new Idea Sponsors. If this last term was about gaming and social connections, this coming term is going to be about location awareness. We'll be creating applications that highlight tourist destinations, local food, people's names and the world around us all, right here and right now.
The bar has been set high this term, but the only thing to do with a high bar is jump over it. I'm ridiculously excited for this coming term and can't wait to share everything we do.
