In his spare time, a program manager builds an application that lets his family track his whereabouts over the Internet. The cell phone app showcases Microsoft technology.
By Laurie Rowell
What do you do in your spare time? Over a four-week span, Nagi Babu Punyamurthula built an application that turned his cell phone into a beacon that beams his location to an Internet map.
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“I can upload my GPS position to my server, and my family can go to the Web page map to see where I am,” said Punyamurthula.
Matching the clear simplicity of the concept, he named the application Where Am I. He envisions families using it to keep in touch with a parent or child or rescue workers using it to find lost or missing persons. Future iterations will turn phones into social networking devices and display nearby points of interest such as restaurants, gas stations, ATMs, and parks.
What started out as a hobby project quickly grew in scope, and now Punyamurthula hopes to make it a Windows Live service.
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My friends over in the Applied Game Theory team at MS Research. They won an MS-sponsored research contest and to celebrate, two of them dyed their hair, and they all got temporary tattoos.
In June I had a 7:30am meeting with some of the guys from the Applied Games research group. The crew was visiting from Cambridge, where they’re based, and despite jetlag and the ungodly hour (seriously, guys: 7:30 breakfast meeting? Gleargh.) we had a hilarious time.
So, WTF do they do? Well, according to their website, Our mission is to leverage the methods of approximate probabilistic inference for addressing relevant applications both in recreational games and in abstract decision games played in the real world. This means these guys make their living thinking of everything as a game … and they certainly seem to have way more fun than the average researchers.
They’re working on some cool super-secret stuff with Bungie and figuring out ways to apply their game-brains to typically un-fun stuff like online advertising. They taught me a few German phrases (quotienfrau!) and I taught them what “Brouhaha” means. (Ah yes: a noisy response to stimulus! Of course.)
“Beyond 9:30am or so, nothing is typical (which is something I love working at Microsoft).” Read the whole post.
