I accidently happened upon an Android G2 Google I/O edition phone (with 30-day SIM card, etc.) (The giveaway was detailed on TechCrunch.)
I'll give this away to the developer who convinces me that she or he will do something cool with it! Leave me a comment or send me a tweet, and I'll pick a winner on Monday night 9pm PST.
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I travel frequently and have often thought as I land in a different town or drive down an Interstate that it would be cool to have an instant news app on my phone that finds my new location, searches for local news, and displays a digest of what's happening where I now am. (Google News Search now has a 'geo' attribute that would make local-only news possible.) The app would offer to subscribe to the RSS feeds of local media outlets to keep me updated while I am visiting, then unsubscribe me when I return home. A tie-in to Google Local Search is obvious. How about reviews of local restaurants found in local newspapers and websites?
Over the summer I'll be doing research with Wellesley College on the Microsoft Surface and iPhone, researching ways that we can support scientific data and discoveries on these multi-touch devices that support reality-based interaction. It would be great to be able to develop on my own Android phone as well! Not to mention, I'll be going to grad school for Human-Computer Interaction in the fall, and the Android G2 (whenever they release it in the US) is my first choice for personal phone and portable device to develop apps on.
My name is Rishabh Mishra, and I am planning several potential applications with the phone.
The first such application will be a BZFlag client for the phone. If you are not familiar, BZFlag (http://bzflag.org) is an open-source 3D multi-player tank battle game. I talked with the BZFlag community, and they say that BZFlag server admins will most likely accept the Android client if it does not cause issues with other players (severe lag, jitter, packet-loss; cheats; etc).
I will be planning for two clients. The first client will be 2D only, which will only include the radar and chat features of the client. This will be for users that want to check into a server, monitor what is going on, and perhaps do some very light game-play.
The second client will be a 3D client, and will be designed to use the Google Android device to create the best possible game-play. The graphics of the second client will be pretty low-quality, but most BZFlag servers generally can be played with very low quality graphics. This client will almost certainly be a drain on battery, and would probably be best suited for Android net-books or plugged-in phones. In addition, this client would only allow the user to log into a BZFlag server if the device was connected to WiFi (phone Internet would result in severe lag and other network issues). I admit that the idea of a 3D, multi-player tank battle game on an operating system initially released for phones is somewhat insane. But I think that Android has the functionality to make it technically possible.
But gaming isn't the only type of application that I will be concentrating on. I will also work to write a native Android FriendFeed (See: http://friendfeed.com/) client, complete with notifications when activity in certain feeds occurs. One currently existing FriendFeed application, Mother Feed, suffers from severe instability--and no offense to the developer--but I'm not a big fan of it's user interface.
In addition to FriendFeed, I'm also planning a native Laconica (See: http://laconi.ca/trac/) client. Currently, the Android applications Twidroid and Twitli support Laconica-based servers, but many people take issue with Twidroid, and I find that Twitli's user interface needs significant improvement.
Finally, I will create a calculator for Android. Not any calculator. A truly awesome calculator. A calculator for Android that is equivalent to a TI-83. There are scientific calculators and equation graphers for Android, but I don't think that any of them have the user interface or the features to make them worth downloading. For example, one user interface issue that the default Android calculator has is that, when sliding to the scientific panel and clicking a button, you're immediately shuttled back to the basic operations panel. This makes heavy usage of the scientific functions somewhat difficult. If I were to create my scientific+graphing calculator, very advanced mathematical functions would be easily accessible, making life just that much easier for Android-toting math nerds.
All of this is a pretty tall order. It most likely will take me a very long time to develop all of this; but I have the drive to develop it. Maybe you think I will not develop these applications, and I'm just throwing ideas at you in the hope that you will grant me the device. But that would be incorrect; regardless of how long it takes, I will definitely attempt to develop these applications (I say "attempt," with the 3D BZFlag client in mind).
However, being able to test my applications on the hardware you are providing will almost certainly assist in ironing a few bugs out, perhaps.
Thank you very much for reading this lengthy comment and thinking about my ideas.
Really I don't develop software or alot of that techno mumbo, but I tell you I would develop is hugh cases of jealousy from all my geeky friends. The phone looks cool, please tell my it will be available to more then just t-mobile. I look forward to dropping winmo.
Good luck picking someone as the winner.
At the moment I am working on a note application containing categories and tags. This will integrate with calendar and RTM (hopefully). I would also like to add the ability to send notes to other people via sms or email. The main aim of this is to get used to working with the api and implementation for other projects to follow.
Been thinking about the next app and I like the idea of a 'Flight of the Conchords' meets NIN iphone app...could be a good fun app, with video, chat, and tour itineraries etc.
Together with a friend of mine we will be working on developing android apps to make it our business, we have several other ideas (both big and small) which we will be developing once we finish our test applications.
Unfortunately without an app it makes it a bit difficult to fully test the usability and experience of the applications we develop. Not to mention it would be very cool to have a Google i/o phone.
Interesting contest - cool. I've been wanting to do this this for my BlackBerry, but this would give me a chance to play with Android for the first time.
I'd build a remote visualization tool - point the app to various data feeds, and based on the data and types of data in the feed, it suggests possible visualizations (tag clouds, charts, moving graphcs, lists, etc) and keeps them up to date on the device.
This is primarily useful for business purposes, e.g. monitoring traffic, key business metrics, inventory, etc.
Pair that with the next version, which could allow users to degine triggers (e.g. if data1 is less than a specific value, or if data2 has the word "alarm", or if data3 is within 1 mile) that alert the user, and you have a very useful business intelligence tool for execs and managers on Android.
It also has a very clear developent path for future versions: more visualization options and more trigger types.
It also provides an interesting UX challenge. Fun times!
I'd love to use Android to track users progress in certain activities (rock climbing, biking, running, etc.) and use the various statistics to graph and provide the user with analytical data which can be used in constructing a better training routine, or simply to let a user see how far they've come. Eventually I would like to create a system which medical researchers could use (users phones would send data back to a central server which would make the data available to whomever was running the study) to track extremely large groups for study.
The Kick-Ass Contact App.
It replaces the built-in contact app, but pulls contact info from your personal Gmail, your Exchange account at work, Twitter, Facebook and other social media contacts.
The one contact list for your entire freakin' life. You've got five contact lists all over the Internet, and this Internet-based phone... why can't they all combine?
Obviously sortable since you may not want to see all your Facebook contacts when you just want to call your ladyfriend, but Facebook may be the only way you still talk to that girl from college.
It also ties in at the OS level to let other apps interact with them (with correct permissions, etc etc).
Cool Contest, count me in ...
I have 4 apps all written for paying clients, but alas, still no hardware to test my work on myself.
The concept app that I would love to create is an interactive web server running as a service on an Android phone. Tied directly with a Twitter account, people would click on a link in the profile or any website that navigates them to the web server.
The act of loading a page (assuming it hasn't done so recently) would emit a brief audio tone from the phone and then take a picture. The picture, automatically twitpic'd and published via the related twitter account would serve as a window into your world.
Give the visiting web client the option to dual post the twitpic to their own twitter account and you've got the Viral Android Tweeting Server!
My Mobile App Project:
A taxi-coordination system for international markets will complement transit, leverage existing taxi systems, and lower the barrier for 'innovative' modes of transit between carsharing and taxi.
I have posted the alpha for your consideration at http://mishwarnow.com
Justification:
China wants to address mobility needs now before they build transportation infrastructure... and thereby fix their urban energy demand for the next 100 years.
About Me:
I'm a former ridesharing entrepreneur. I've been to conferences with Paul Resnick, and worked in the research group that did the original assessment of casual carpooling. I have worked in government, in a Chinese research thinktank, and in academia. I have played web2.0 as a coworking freelancer ... and gone 'all in' as an entrepreneur. I speak Spanish and some Chinese, and have many international business contacts.
I twitter at http://twitter.com/jdar
Why Android, instead of iPhone:
Android is positioned very well in all of my potential markets, and internationally in general.
Kudos for launching the contest. Here's the idea I'm working on...
I want to implement an Android app and a web app to help people spend their money more consciously by tracking past expenses and budget their future spending.
I plan to initially develop this system for myself only and, after a couple of months of learning about spending patterns and improving system's features, gradually make it available to other cost-conscious Android users who want to optimize their spending in these harsh times of recession and provide valuable feedback for improving the system.
I will design and implement an easy way to track all those expenses, to overview and navigate through expenses in a user-friendly way - by period and user-defined categories/tags and provide insight into user's spending habits. Easier entry of expenses/items would be provided through bar codes and QR code scanning in supermarkets and shopping malls, with scanned codes together with user-contributed product names and prices entering the crowdsourced database of products. Repeated purchases would result in faster expense tracking that could be done in aisles or while waiting in line.
Both Android and web apps would be used for data entry, viewing reports, while Android app would also provide notifications about relevant events like overshooting a budget for a category or reminding of a regular purchase (either explicitly defined or derived from user's spending habits).
When available, geo fix (network location and/or GPS) would be also used so that each tracked expense is bound to a location, allowing that a correct product price is identified. Once the system becomes scalable and used a substantial user base, crowdsourced database of products should be able to provide suggestions of cheaper comparable products that could be found nearby. I can see various APIs being used to provide extra information (like Google Search API), as well as to create reports and visualizations of collected data (Google Spreadsheets and charts functionality already available there). There's a possibility to populate product database from interested vendors (as Big in Japan has done for ShopSavvy, for example).
To round things off, there will be a game twist added to the Android app that would motivate more people into using the Android app regularly. Since this concept is cool and generic enough to be stolen by someone reading this, I prefer to keep it secret. :-) Brad, I'll share it with you if you want to know more.
Cheers!
Nenad Nikolic a.k.a. Shonzilla
http://twitter.com/Shonzilla
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