jodhpuriGuy | Avi Mehta

So yesterday, I talked about hITEC, The other project I was working on is called MoMedia. This project was similar to “Video On The Wall“, more generalized, more Mobile based and had Social Networking at its heart. Here are some details from our notes:

• To create a location based blogging service for Mobile Phones (You can upload Images, Videos, Text or Audio)
• Provide an engaging UI for users to view other people in the neighborhood who are blogging from the same platform.
• Create a social networking experience by allowing users to follow others(twitter anyone?), add other users as friends/fellow workers etc.
• Integrate the network with Facebook, Orkut, twitter so that status updates can be propagated to all networks. (Friendfeed ? - I guess so just  that when we thought of the idea, it wasn’t there)
• Provide users with a blog and allow users to specify their own blogs like wordpress and blogger so that posts can be posted their directly without any action on user’s part.

The screen shots follow after the break.

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I have not been active on the blog for quite some time. The reasons being the heavy course load and the work that I have been involved in. Two of the projects that I was working on for quite some time got over last week. One of them, hITEC had the final presentations last Friday. We were a team of 5 people from different departments at UCI and we worked over the last 3 months on this project. The details follow:

Video On The Wall

The project revolved around the idea of Citizen reporting. The new thing in our case was the clever use of  technology that we used and the ease of use and no cost of involvement on user’s part. The main features of the project can be described as:

• Reporters(anyone can be one!) stream videos(yes live!) from their mobile phones. (We used android as our mobile client but it is not limited to that in any way!)
• The web client, that can be accessed through the browser, shows the videos that are currently being streamed and also provides access to the archived videos.
• Use of mobile platform features like the location determination to show relevant content.
• Instant feedback from the browser to the mobile phone thus creating an experience of interactive media.
• Lucrative revenue model and sharing of revenue with Reporters.

Technology-wise, The project involved development of mobile client on Android (Java), Server in Ruby on Rails and Flash for Video streaming and interactive experience.

Below are some of the screenshots of the web client. (Mobile client simply streams videos with a few other simple screens thus nothing much to show there…)

UPDATE: The announcement of the competition results can found here.

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Hello there!

If you have seen earlier designs of my website, You would have noticed that I recently moved on to a blog format. Just before it, I had a simple but a milestone website which I would now refer to as Dark Chocolate. This website was special because of many reasons. Let me list some of the features here…

• Leverage use of Javascript & AJAX while supporting older browsers through same interface. The website uses AJAX to load page contents and caches the contents so you will load any page just once! If for some reason, no javascript is not available, You are NOT redirected to some other webpage. Instead, you can just click on the same links to navigate to some other pages. For a normal user: If javascript is available, you get fast loads and cached contents and otherwise, you browse normally.
• The Even if you use javascript, You get to copy past any link and get the same page in other browser. Let me explain it in a bit more detail… Normally, when a website uses javascript, the history gets broken and you cant get the same page if you copy and paste the link in a different window. In dark Chocolate, each of the page has a unique page url which enables the user to just use the link as it is…

Have a look at it! and tell me how it was…

Recently I posted about many things I need to do this quarter. I wanted a simple ToDo manage all the things I had to do. Although there are loads of services out there, many of them were web based and hence no access when I am not connected. For those on desktop, Where is the syncability? And how do I modify the ones on desktop to do all the stuff I want to do? I thought I’d rather create one of my own :)… I had named it DoIt initially but then changed the name to YouDo today. Want to know more? Well… its coming pretty soon… Meanwhile here’s s screen shot.