WebInProgress – final chapter

WebInProgress, the first pilot edition is finished. For us, as organizers, it was a great experience. We saw projects being born and, week by week, being grown. We met highly skilled and passionate students and we all shared our ideas and experience. And in the end, we had the chance to check out some great live presentation directly from the project authors.

But the deadline came and, I must admit – the hardest part for me, judging. Even though we had to vote a top, I must say that the decision was close and I would recommend anyone to check all the projects. But enough talking, here are the winners
1^st prize – Face Recognition for Mobile Phones – Octavian Sima, Elena Holobiuc (BSD license)
2^nd prize – AirJobDone – Andrei Dulceanu (Apache License 2.0)
3^rd prize – LabRemote – Ioan-Alexandru Eftimie, Sergiu Iordache, Irina Preșa (GPL v3)
4^th prize – Plant Care – Sinziana Mihaela Gafitanu (LGPL)

Even though this was the final chapter (of this edition), my hope is that a new edition will come and we will have at least as good projects and contestants.

Web In Progress – final submission extended

Taking into account the unavailability of some of you for the final presentation or for submitting the final application (and also to simulate other production environments :)), we decided to extend the deadline with two more weeks. So the deadline for submitting your final applications will be October 10, 2010. All other following deadlines will also be delayed with one week. Please see the revised WebInProgress contest rules.
Even though the deadline was extended it is better to stick to the original plan and not extend the scope of your project. Use this time to fine tune small details that will make the big difference.

Good luck!!!

Web In Progress – project details

As promised I came back with details and links about the Web In Progress finalists.

• AirJobDone – Andrei Dulceanu (Apache License 2.0)
  

  Air Job Done is an Adobe AIR client which helps people to find a job by scanning the major job sites and by submitting an alert when a job corresponding to the user’s criteria is found.
  Other capabilities: sending of an e-mail/twit over Twitter when a job is found, real-time searching for jobs (background job), showing where the companies are located (only for Bucharest), recommendation system for similar jobs.
  Air Job Done will be implemented as a widget and the following technologies will be used in developing it: Adobe AIR, Yahoo BOSS, Yahoo Maps, Twitter API.

• Face Recognition for Mobile Phones – Octavian Sima, Elena Holobiuc (BSD license)
  

  In our project, we develop a face recognition mobile phone application able to connect and send a photo to a server. The server will detect faces in that image, apply some image processing techniques, perform face recognition and, using the recognized persons’ IDs, extract information about those persons from a MySQL database. The recognize faces and persons data will be sent back to the mobile phone and displayed.
  We will also develop a real-time web-cam face detection and recognition software which will be used to generate training face images and to test recognition performances.

• Image gallery – Silvia Elena Stanculescu
  

  The Image Gallery will be an free, open source project enabling management and publication of digital photographs through a PHP-enabled web server. Image Gallery will be created to provide an easy place for friends and relatives to create and maintain their own photo albums.

• LabRemote – Ioan-Alexandru Eftimie, Sergiu Iordache, Irina Preșa (GPL v3)
  

  Using this application the assistant can easily take attendance and grade the students using the smartphone.
  The application will allow retrieving the student list (name and avatar) according to the timetable, grading the students and exporting/synchronizing the information back to Moodle and/or Google Docs / other interfaces. It will also allow viewing/editing the timetable, group assignment and attendance from the smartphone information.

• Plant Care – Sinziana Mihaela Gafitanu (LGPL)
  

  Plant Care is an application for smart phones that use the Android OS designed to help users take care of house plants. Its main purpose is to keep track of the watering schedule, displaying notifications every time a plant needs watering. The app keeps track of the climate of the area and modifies the water intake according to season, and the type of plant.
  The application creates a profile for every plant, including the species (or places it in a group of plant with similar characteristics), the position in the room (how much light it receives ), information about fertilizer, plus a few tips and tricks. It uses this information to create a schedule for every plant and a big schedule for all the plants (there will be small rectifications here in order to group the plants, so that the number of task associated to taking care of them is reduced as much as possible).
  Further scheduling can be accomplished by setting time intervals when the user is not home, and can’t take care of the plants, in that interval no notifications will be displayed. There is also a delay function that allows the user to postpone the watering if he is unable to do so at that time.
  If a user does not know the species of a certain plant, there is an intuitive interface that guides the user through a variety of characteristics of witch he has to choose in order to identify a group that would be similar to the needs of the plant.

• Thematic chat – Marius-Tudor Benea (Modified BSD License)

Web In Progress – second phase

Below are the projects in the second phase of the contest:

• AirJobDone – Andrei Dulceanu (Apache License 2.0)
• Face Recognition for Mobile Phones – Octavian Sima, Elena Holobiuc (BSD license)
• Image gallery – Silvia Elena Stanculescu, Alexandru Dobre
• LabRemote – Ioan-Alexandru Eftimie, Sergiu Iordache, Irina Preșa (GPL v3)
• Plant Care – Sinziana Mihaela Gafitanu (LGPL)
• Thematic chat – Marius-Tudor Benea (Modified BSD License)

I will come back with more details and links to projects.

Web In Progress – proposals

As promised I said I’m back with some project proposals for the WebInProgress contest. Please keep in mind that these are merely some examples, you can register your own proposal.

1. Mobile VNC server – Implement a “lightweight” VNC server for mobile. What “lightweight” means must be defined.
2. XSidebar – Implement an easy customizable/scriptable cross-browser sidebar. This is not part of a specific web page, but augments the web browser. It is usually implemented as web browser add-on.
3. RSS mobile widget – a mobile widget (not standalone application) capable of displaying an RSS feed.
4. Rendering engine in Firefox – implement a Firefox add-on that will integrate different rendering engines like IE (multiple versions), Webkit or Opera in Firefox. A project can implement only one rendering engine, and ideally all the projects will be interoperable.
5. Anti-spam application for mobiles – an application that will block spam (SMS, email, instant messages) for mobile. This will integrate with a community anti-spam server.
6. SyncML for bookmarks – define a SyncML protocol for bookmarks and implement it for mobile and/or major browsers.
7. Mobile gallery – an image gallery that works with different source like local images, Flickr, Snapfish, Picassa, Google Images etc. New sources should be easy to configure and add.
8. Mobile/desktop/web reporting widget – a widget that will display a chart (pie, bar etc) aggregating data from web services. The widget will be implemented on a mobile platform, desktop or within a web page.
9. XSLT browser add-on – a browser add-on that is applying an XSLT and displaying result on-the-fly for the current tab.
10. VoiceXML mobile browser (hint: leverage mobile voice recognition and speech synthesis capabilities of the device)

And in the end a few considerations for all the proposals

• For mobile applications the following platforms can be used: Android, webOS or any other major one. For a project, a team can consider only one implementation. It would be ideal that all the implementations (even from different teams) be interoperable and offer a similar user experience.
• For browsers add-ons the following browsers can be considered: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.

Web In Progress – registration and rules

The contest is open to students in the technical field from Bucharest universities that love to develop open source applications for web and mobile.

To participate in the contest you must register yourself or your Team by e-mail until July 20, 2010. Send an e-mail to webinprogress@hp.com that will include

• Your name and all the names of your Team members (up to three including yourself)
• A Curriculum Vitae of you and all of your team members
• A title and description of maximum 5000 words for your application (App) proposal
• The open source license under which the App will be submitted and developed
• The reason for participating in this contest

You will receive a confirmation e-mail until July 25, 2010 if your App proposal qualifies for the contest and you can move to the next phase.

The complete contest rules can be found here.

WORKING AREA! WEB IN PROGRESS …

We are WEBINSANE, WEBINSPIRED, WEBADDICTED. What about you?

Wednesday, 30 of June, at 11:00, in University of Polytechnics, the contest “Web In Progress” was launched. This contest is sponsored by Hewlett Packard and is addressed to all the students (and graduates from 2010) from Bucharest universities that love open source, web and mobile. You are invited to develop an open source application in the web and mobile area.

You can view (or review) the slides from the live presentation.

I will come back with rules, registration process and project proposals. Stay tuned!