On November 29, 2013 students at the School of Information Management gathered to showcase their mobile app concepts at SIM’s Second Mobile App Concept Design Showcase. The competition was organized by Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd and was part of the INFO 5590: Information Management Systems course.

As part of this course, students were asked to work in teams to propose and design a novel mobile application that can help organizations to better deliver information and services to their end users. Students had to research the information needs of their respective organizations and come up with an app to address those needs.

On the day of the competition, the teams gathered in Dal’s interactive learning studio located in the Killam Library, also known as LINC – Learning Incubator & Networking Centre (LINC) to present their mobile app concepts. Their apps were evaluated by judges with expertise in mobile app and enterprise development, information management and user interface design, including:
• Dr. Mike Smit, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University
• Gwendolyn MacNairn, Dalhousie Libraries, Dalhousie University
• Sarah Visintini, Social Media Lab, Dalhousie University
• Philip Mai, Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship, Dalhousie University
• Sreejata Chatterjee, Leadsift

Each judge played the role of an “investor” with a hypothetical $1 million to invest. At the end of the event, the top three apps (determined by the judges) received prizes.

 

The three winning teams were:

1st place – Group #12: LitQuest (Patrick Hanratty, Alyssa Harder, Ray MacLeod, James Ross, Emma Stewart)

2nd Place – Group #3: Due or Die: Night of the Living Deadlines (Alieda Blandford, Caitlyn Carson, Valerie Collins, Tamara Proulx, Benjamin Worth)

3rd Place – Group #8 : Park It! Halifax (Emily Colford, Alexandra Jardim, Patti Simmons, Marvellous Unuadjefe, Maureen Wallace)

Congratulation to the winning teams!

Below is list of all of the app ideas presented at the event.

Group 1: MapMyFun (MMF) (Mark Black, Madeline Driscoll, Alison Froese Stoddard, Shauna Hall-Coates, Dominique Taylor)

MapMyFun (MMF) is an application used to aggregate, store, organize, map, and share user-created multimedia content, including content from external mobile applications accessed via APIs, in an augmented reality context.

Group 2: TFSA The Right Way (Pia Dewar, Gayle Graham, Marc Harper, Jannaya Jensen, Lee Wilson)

Our App will be designed to help Canadians contribute to Tax Free Savings Accounts (TFSAs) without being penalized. It will let users know how much contribution room they have left, display the interest rates of all Canadian banks if users wish to switch banks, and will have a built in calculator allowing users to calculate how much they will save over time if they contribute X amount of money each week/second week/month etc. This App will also factor in interest rates. Users can choose one of two options, project their savings over time with the current interest rate or project their savings over time based on historical changes in rates.

 

Group 3: Due or Die: Night of the Living Deadlines (Alieda Blandford, Caitlyn Carson, Valerie Collins, Tamara Proulx, Benjamin Worth)

Due or Die: Night of the Living Deadlines is an adventure game that encourages you to finish your To-do list. Your avatar is struggling to survive a zombie apocalypse and only your productivity can save him! Simply input your tasks and projects, and they become an integral part of the game. There are in-game incentives for real-life task completion, and consequences for letting deadlines slide. Due or Die will allow you to organize your calendar, and specify due dates or priority levels for tasks. Will your avatar find food, shelter, weapons, or water? Or will the zombies begin to swarm? Gameplay depends on you.

 

Group 4: IndieCan (Amy Belanger, Laurie Chase, Harry Enman, Maggie Pearson, Andrew Roy)

IndieCan is a mobile application that connects readers with Canadian literature from independent and self-published sources. It will provide excerpts of works from independently published books and full texts of self-published works. IndieCan offers readers the insider’s view of what is happening in Canadian independent literature. It promotes Canadian content, emerging writers, and allows writers to share their work. It creates a platform for readers to support local writers through a pay-what you-can model.

 

Group 5: Double Vision (Heather Deagle, Elliott Gish, Lama Khoshaim, Karine Lelievre, Jeremy Zwanenburg)

Double Vision (DV) is a Mash-up application that supports social TV or what is called second screen experience (watching TV and tweeting about the show). DV streams TV “legally” on the internet with the ability to tweet using relevant hashtags, eliminating the need for two screens. This application offers a tagcloud of relevant hashtags from which users can choose. The hashtag will show in the twitter feed. This eliminates the need to search for relevant hashtags.

 

Group 6: Student Discount Locator (SDL App) (Catherine Boutilier, Kiersten Bradley, Brianne Carter, Alyssa Dawson, Alison Manley)

The SDL app will help students find businesses that offer student discounts in Halifax and Dartmouth. Businesses that have standing discounts will be included in the application, along with businesses that offer discounts on a weekly or daily basis. The SDL app will be useful to students who need to stick to a budget, but it will also benefit the businesses that provide information about their discounts as it will serve as advertising for them. The app will also include a function that allows users to submit data about student discounts they know about.

 

Group 7: inform (Kaitlin Haley, Andrea Kampen, Carlisle Kent, Hilary Lynd, Mark McCumber)

inForm is an exciting new app that allows organizations and their clients to exchange information instantly. By ‘bumping’ devices, organizations can instantly send PDF pamphlets containing information and promotions to clients. Pre-authorized client information is simultaneously sent to the organizations for marketing purposes. This quick and easy exchange proves to be mutually beneficial for both the organization and the clients. This app is free for the individual client, and organizations pay a small subscription fee. In order to use the app, clients must provide a basic profile. The client profile consists of: year of birth, first three digits of their postal code, gender (with option to not include), and sector of employment. This information is used for basic market analysis by the organizations. For organizations who want more detailed information from clients, the second level of information sharing is essential. Another exciting feature of this app is the incentive that organizations can share with their clients. By navigating the simple interface new promotions are shared with clients through the app which can be redeemed by the clients where appropriate.

 

Group 8: Park It! Halifax (Emily Colford, Alexandra Jardim, Patti Simmons, Marvellous Unuadjefe, Maureen Wallace)

Park It! Halifax is an easy to use application for iOS devices that takes the stress out of finding a place to park in downtown Halifax. Users are able to limit what type of parking is shown by selecting the type of parking they are looking for or duration of time they need the space. Park It!Halifax uses GPS to mark the location of the user’s car so they don’t have to spend time searching for where they have parked. It also has a countdown timer telling users how long they have left on their meters, ensuring that they avoid any fines for expired meters.

 

Group 9: Pet Saver (Laura Corscadden, Maggie Neilson, Kallen Rutledge, Rebecca Thompson, Sarah Wood)

The mobile application designed to provide users with the reliable information they need in order to make the right decisions and take the appropriate actions when their pet unexpectedly consumes a foreign substance.

 

Group 10: The Great HRM Adventure (Mingyue Chen, Linda Cormier, Melanie Grant, Danika Kowpak, Jaq-lin Larder)

The application enables the user to create his or her very own travel adventure, by designing a personal itinerary in a step-by-step manner. Once the application is downloaded, the user will be presented with two adventure options: Explorer and Treasure Hunter. This will allow the user to choose a destination out of four options. The application also includes functions like: destination information; a Google map and daily travel log; food stall options; random destination selection; “back” or revisit option; save place button to pick up on the adventure tomorrow; and a finish button that ends the adventure for the day. The application also allows the user to contact friends or family through a direct link to Facebook, so they can share their adventure with loved ones.

 

Group 11: uRead (Maria Bartlett, Gabrielle Brydges, Heather Campbell, Megan O’Brien, Heather Reid, Jennie Thompson)

The uRead application is a way for reluctant readers to re-engage with reading. It is designed with users from grades 6-10 (approximately 11-16 years old) in mind, as most low- level, high-interest reading initiatives are developed for either adults or young children, ignoring those who fall into neither category.

 

Group 12: LitQuest (Patrick Hanratty, Alyssa Harder, Ray MacLeod, James Ross, Emma Stewart)

With the advent of social media services like Tumblr, and the increasing popularity of Young Adult fiction, young readers are engaging with their favourite novels in ways that are both increasingly personal and social. One such trend is for fans to travel to the real-life locations mentioned in their favourite novels, taking pictures that either simply document their trip or, in some cases, depict the events of the novel right there in the real world. LitQuest is an exciting new mobile app that seeks to facilitate the sharing of such photos within the fandom community. LitQuest takes the most popular Young Adult novels with real world settings, provides GIS data for the locations where events in the novel take place, and encourages users to submit their best photos of those locations, whether they be literary tourism or full-on re-creations. By including gamification features, LitQuest rewards those users who post the highest quality photos, providing rankings based on the number of locations a user submits from, and the popularity of their photos in the LitQuest community.