Droid Projects

[jrising]

"I am Ready & Willing to offer my Services to any Nation or People under heave who are Desirous of Liberty & Equality"

I now have a Droid, Google/Motorola/Verizon's new PDA. First, it's an excellent device-- powerful and slick, lots of space, 5 MP camera, a touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard. To me though, it's all pretty pointless. I don't need it to organize any aspect of my life, I don't want any more pervasive connectivity a cell and a laptop give me, and I don't like playing with computers. I wouldn't have gotten it if I hadn't needed it for this project.

I have 11 more days during which I can return it. But it is sweet-edge technology, and now I have all this knowledge of how to code the thing-- why not use it?

But I need your help! I'm looking for fun projects that can either (1) recoup some of this $70 a month I'm spending, or (2) help PDAers live greener. To that end, I have some ideas:

Greener, Every Day Calendar

This would be a free "page-a-day" style calendar, juxtaposing pretty pictures (e.g. of climate change) with steps you can take to lessen/extend your impact. I hope to have connections to tons of non-profits soon through Democracy In Action, and they might have a lot to contribute.

It will be both personalized and built on community-contributions. Anyone will be able to submit additional day-pages on the website, and at the bottom of each day will be rating buttons ("up-thumb" and "down-thumb"), which both inform your preferences and affect the likelihood of those pages for other people. Also, there will be a "I'm doing it!" button next to the thumb buttons, which both lets users see their strength in numbers, and allows some pages to be "follow-ups" on other pages (e.g., one page might suggest "Move to Washington, DC", and if you do it, then you'll get another one that says "Work for Democracy In Action").

Open Artificial Intelligence

You can get a little chat A.I. that you can interact with, and teach, and watch it learn, and grow, and interact with your phone. I helped build a huge text-based A.I. for Virsona, and now I'm working on open-sourcing pieces of it. It can get responses from a dozen sources and learn in multiple ways, it understands grammar, emotion, the relationships between words, implied concepts and conversation trends. And now it's built on a plugin design, where anyone can add new intelligence, new knowledge, and new ways of interacting. There would be free and paid-for versions of this.

Virtual Painter

Turn your PDA into a virtual paint-brush, and view your pieces of art through its lens. You can paint anything-- a wall, a piece of furniture, a tree-- by selecting a color and sweeping the PDA like a brush. Any time you look through the PDA's camera, you can see your work of art. I might even make the paintings shareable, so that anyone who passes by the bus-stop that you graffitied can see it. A demo would be available for free, with a limited amount of paint.

I'm pretty excited about working on any of these, but I'm open to anything you've always wanted on your phone.

Comments

[jrising.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting to do something similar, where the optimization is on fewer unintended global consequence dollars. The problem I have is that I don't think that people will type in their grocery list beforehand, or scan barcodes at the store (there's an app called ShopSavvy that does this and compares to prices online), or really want to do much work at all to get the benefits.

The best solution I've thought of is an app that scans receipts, and then gives you a succinct report of what you can do better next time.