CIS Undergrads Collaborate with Telephone Service Startup
CIS Undergraduates Abdul Binrsheed, Craig Gardner, and John St. John collaborated with a Toronto-based web startup company, Fonolo, to port the company's telephone service system from the web to the Google Android mobile phone. The Fonolo telephone service can automatically navigate corporate phone trees to get to a human being. Phone trees are the annoying systems that prompt the caller with "Press 1 for departures, press 2 for arrivals, etc." The students were presented with a challenge in their Winter 2009 CIS 422 Software Methodologies class to build systems that navigate phone trees and then present the corporate representative who picks up the phone with a voice prompt to be connected to their caller. Fonolo, it turns out, already provides roughly a similar system.
Following the software development practice of adapting pre-existing code to solve new problems, Binrsheed, Gardner, and St. John identified another fun challenge--porting the existing Fonolo system from the web to their new Google Android mobile phones. Fonolo's CEO Shai Berger quickly caught wind of the students' efforts through one of the students' Twitter announcements, and was impressed. He offered his assistance, including access to the company's phone tree database and corporate graphics that the students added to their handheld software. The CEO then went on to promote the students' work at the eComm 2009 and 360 iDev conferences.
The students uploaded their class project onto the Android online marketplace and enjoyed over 700 downloads in the first two weeks. "We learned how to develop for a brand new fast growing market, the mobile phone application market," said student St. John. "These students did a really great job, and the project was a win-win situation," added Prof. Anthony Hornof, the instructor of the course. "The students learned important software engineering principles, which is the point of the class, in the context of working with cutting edge new technology, which was really exciting for them." These students' experience is one of many exciting undergraduate education opportunities in CIS at the University of Oregon.