Last night I went to Gannett/USA Today’s headquarters in McLean for Pete Erickson’s Disruptathon Mobile Application challenge. It was a terrific evening and something I would expect to see in Silicon Valley not in the DC Area. Pete got a couple of hundred mobile app enthusiasts to come and hear from (and judge) presentations from 10 new mobile applications. All ten apps were very good but the highlights to me were:
Skyfer - This service/app seemed to me like a micro version of LivingSocial or Groupon. It allows anyone to publish the availability of products or services, for a limited time, at a certain price within a certain distance from where you are. While this was described for traditional merchants I think that a huge potential for this is for service companies. For example if a landscape gardener has an open morning they can “skyfe” their availability in a certain area and anyone in that area can “skyfe” their request for the time (OK I forget which way they were using the term Skyfe !!). This seems like an interesting combination of CraigsList and Living Social/Groupon. I also think that the fact that it is easy to restrict your offers by time and location that this would minimize the documented issues where LS/Groupon vendors have been totally overrun by the increases in business that have threatened their businesses.
TrafficTalk – This app takes an interesting approach to dealing with traffic. It sounds like it is an open audio channel that you can connect to and listen to others, in the same area, talk about where there are delays on your route. If you have any additional input you can also change to a talk mode where you can add your comments. Like many of the community type applications the utility of this app is going to depend on how many others are using the same app in your immediate area. An interesting twist with TrafficTalk is that they have “traffic hosts” who will moderate the audio comments and interact with the folks on the road. A differentiator that they pointed out between them and other traffic apps is that you are not required to read the screen on the phone while you are driving as all the information is coming through your speakers as audio.
RXMindme – This is an app that I personally could have used a few months ago when a family member was released from an extended hospital stay with 19 different presciptions, each with a different schedule. My solution then was a huge spreadsheet with checkboxes for each time a certain medicine needed to be taken. With RXMindme each of the prescriptions can be entered by picking the medications from an included FDA Drug database (worth the purchase price – free – all by itself <gr>) and then entering the schedule. The phone then alerts you when you need to take each prescription and allows you to check-off that you have taken it. A nice feature of the app is that you can create a report of what drugs you took and when you took them to provide back to your physician.
The final two apps were two of my favorites and happen to have won the two top awards of the evening.
One News – I had a bit of a deep dive on this one as I was fortunate enough to sit with Oliver from OneNews at dinner prior to the presentations and I was impressed with their concept. The idea behind it is that today traditional journalists or reporters are most likely going to be beaten to the scene of a newsworthy event by someone with a photo or video enabled cellphone. These citizen jopurnalist will (even today) most likely take photos or video of the events they see but have no consistent way of sharing those images beyond their friends through something like Facebook. That’s where OneNews comes in, they have an app that lets you register with them and whenever you see “news” you can take photos and video which can then be pushed to the OneNews servers and then sysndicated through their network of news outlets. While this wasn’t my favorite app of the evening I did think that it was the most disruptive to an exisitng industry, which was the main focus of the evening and in fact OneNews won the award for most Disruptive application.
Airendipity – I have to confess that I am not usually a fan of computer or phone games so when I read the summary of Airendipity I really thought that this was going to be a bust !! Very much to the contrary I found this to be my favorite app of the evening and unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it justice here. The idea is that you “create” paper airplane that you can put messages on and then launch them in different directions. Other users of the app will see lots of paper airplanes flying around and can grab one, read the message and comment on it before launching it off again. You have the ability to track where your plane is and what route it has taken along with any comments that have been added to it on it’s journey. I thought that this was even more impressinve when Kevin Barret, the developer of the app confessed that he had written up the idea for the application in order to submit it to Disruptathon and then when it was accepted he spent the last nine days creating the app – pretty impressive !! I guess I was not alone in being impressed by Airendipity as it won almost all of the awards for the evening.
It was an enjoyable and informative evening and thanks once again to Gannett for hosting and to Pete Erickson and his Disruptahon crew for pulling it all together.