BarCampWaterloo reminder: It’s this weekend!
This Saturday’s BarCampWaterloo is shaping up to be a lot of fun. Looking forward to finally hearing about subletr, a Google Maps mash-up with off campus housing databases which is a great tool for students looking for a place to live. I will be presenting on a new little application that will be coming out the end of this week or early next and maybe mention something about the new version of UW events.
Hope the geeky crowd of the Waterloo region can make it out for a day of free food and good conversation.
New UW Events ready for testing
A new version of UW Events is ready for testing although its not yet been prettied up. We have added upcoming.org and Facebook API features that lets you post to and retrieve events from Upcoming and pull from Facebook (Facebook doesn’t let you post). We also have profiles that you can maintain that will let you stick your cell phone number in there for SMS reminders at 15 min intervals. There are also custom streams for your events that might not make the main UW Events stream and you can subcribe to your stream (which is public) or hide it from people (but then you can’t subscribe).
Once we get some testing done we will polish it up and update the production version of UW Events. Then we will drop this Ruby on Rails app into Rubyforge for all to use and contribute to.
You will need a UW id to test and if you are interested in testing go to Events beta and give it a go. Let me know what you think. The data has been sync’d with the production version as of Monday so it is pretty much what you see on the production version. Around March 1st will start working on it again so you have until then to give some feedback.
First month of mobile bills: very little data usage
The first month of billing has come in the project participants phone and it shows that even when it is free for them, students don’t seem to use their phone for data:
Data (MB)
- avg = 8.1
- median = 5.2
- max = 37.35
SMS – sent/received
- avg = 66.4/56.52
- median = 37/34
- max = 399/261
In the next couple weeks there will be a few chats with project participants, I am very interested to hear from them why they don’t appear to be taking advantage of the project. They only average two SMS a day? I beat that on my own phone. It could be that they use their current phone and aren’t too keen about moving their life to a device owned by UW. Not moving beyond the phone/SMS is not just observed here but I was expecting higher data and SMS usage.
BarCampWaterloo March 3rd
Well we finally have a venue and a date! The third BarCampWaterloo will take place on Saturday March 3rd from 11am-5pm in the Accelerator Centre on North Campus here at the University of Waterloo. There is plenty of parking next to the building and loads of space.
We are looking for some sponsors to cover some snacks and such so please visit the site and either post to the wiki or grab Simon’s or my contact information and email us if you are interested.
This is open to anyone to attend and participate, come and participate in the fun!
Update: we already have a sponsor for the food and drinks… so there will be pizza!
Mobile apps: what else do you want to do with your phone?
I had an interesting meeting this morning with a newly formed mobile application development group that is tasked with coming up with something that is useful to UW students and runs on a mobile device for the next phase (Spring 2007) of the project. The usual suspects were bounced around: Quest (student information system), Jobmine (Co-op employer/employee management system), Library systems, calenders, etc. Besides targeted data sources we also bounced around the idea of should it be web based and designed for the unpredictable mobile browser or a java app or a Flash mobile app? Each with their own quirky limitations.
What it boils down to though is what do students actually want to do with their phones? Surely you don’t want to apply to courses and fill out long emails but I bet you want to get notifications, reminders, etc. Maybe access quick information on things, send short notes, text other students, look up phone numbers…
This is an open question to all students (and anyone else really), if bandwidth cost was not an issue what would you like to do on your phone besides call people?
