Live Wire Blog

App masters

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Karen Pojmann

Team NearBuy wins RJI iPhone application contest

Photos by Karen Stockman

Journalism student Tony Brown and computer-science student Peng Zhuang present NearBuy, their competition-winning iPhone application.

A housing search tool has opened the door to software development for a group of Mizzou students.

An interdisciplinary team of computer-science and journalism majors has won the Reynolds Journalism Institute iPhone Student Competition with an application called NearBuy. Users of the location-based iPhone app can both search and post listings accessed through the Web’s most comprehensive databases of real estate classifieds — Craigslist, Google Base, Oodle — and sort out their options using interactive maps, neighborhood photos, mortgage/rent calculators, virtual tours and area residents’ reviews.

For their efforts, the team members — Tony Brown, Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang and Peng Zhuang — win a free trip to next month’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.

They’re also raking in job offers from companies in the Sunshine State and close to home.

All in a year’s work

The four winning students were among about five dozen to embark on the iPhone-application-development journey set in motion early in the 2008-09 school year with a “speed dating” session in which students connected with like-minded peers to flesh out their ideas. By Thanksgiving, a panel of judges had narrowed down the number of competing teams to five, all of whom took a trip to California to visit the Apple headquarters. By April, three teams had successfully completed and uploaded their applications into the iTunes Store.

One of the three final teams — Chris Stein, Kevin Karsch, Mary Beth Bergsieker and Brian Grinstead — won the People’s Choice Award determined by online voting. Their application, NewsFlash, uses the iPhone’s spatial technology to deliver location-based news results with customizable features.

Both apps are a hit with users. By May 5, about 300 people were downloading NewsFlash daily, and more than 20,000 people had downloaded NearBuy in the previous month.

Branching out

Contest organizers say perhaps the most valuable outcome of the exercise is growth in interdisciplinary collaboration. Students and faculty in the School of Journalism and the College of Engineering found common ground.

Along with technological innovation, the projects evoked students’ awareness of user preferences and marketing trends. The NearBuy presentation to judges, for example, drew on popular iPhone commercials, replicating the audio effects with targeted music choices dead-on voiceover by team member Tony Brown. Even the techies got caught up in consumer awareness.

“We were not thinking about the most sexy technologies,” said Peng Zhuang. “We were thinking about how to deliver the right features to the right user at the right time. That’s the greatest thing I’ve learned from this competition.”

The NearBuy app makes it possible to post and research real estate listings using a iPhone.

Contest judges included Lex Akers, associate dean of in the MU College of Engineering; Mike Bombich, Apple Systems Engineer; Mark Glaser, executive editor for MediaShift.org; Ben Kruse, director of higher-education mobility for AT&T Business Services; and Jane Ellen Stevens, and RJI fellow 2008-09 and associate faculty in the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of California-Berkeley. Technical and financial support for the projects came from RJI, Apple, AT&T and the MU Interdisciplinary Innovations Fund.