Sybase - Afaria - New Media Institute - University of Georgia - Part 1

http://www.sybase.com

SybaseInc uses Afaria to make all of their mobile applications for pocket PCs easy to use and also easy to understand for the mobile user. The New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, is a teaching and research unit dedicated to discovering the future of mobile media applications.
The New Media Institute is a teaching and research unit dedicated to discovering the future of mobile media applications. We believe the future for mobile media really is in the hands of our students. So what we do is put technology in the hands of creative and energetic and, in many ways, crazy students to see what they come up with and sometimes their ideas are the ones that hold the most potential.
When we first started working with mobile media technology, one of the biggest challenges we had was making it easy for us to continue to use the systems in an effective way. We've got a saying that George Jetson never changes his oil. When you really are working in the future, you dont want to mess with the details. So when we get students engaged in thinking about what this technology can do and then there's a small little thing that doesn't work, a setting is out of place, you need to do a different configuration, it really cuts into the enthusiasm that, students have and it keeps us from really showing off the potential for mobile media technology. So we had to have a system that would allow us to use these devices to their maximum capacity and what we found out was with Sybase iAnywhere, we had a system that would allow us to keep all of our devices consistent and would allow each one of our devices to work all the time the way that we needed it to work.
One of the biggest challenges is that people have a different relationship with the mobile device than they do with the computer that we use in our classrooms. What's amazing for us is when we hand them a pocket PC, somebody you would never have thought to change a setting, change the screen size or colors on a laptop computer or desktop computer, feels very comfortable changing everything they can possibly get their hands on on a mobile device. They feel that it's their personal device and that's been one of our biggest challenges is because we want to give them that flexibility to use it as they would in a real world environment. But, when they screw things up, we still have to make sure it gets fixed. And that's what Afaria has really allowed us to do to kind of allow them the flexibility to make some changes but then to help them recover from those changes to still use the technology in the way that we wanted to see them use it.
Every project that students build in the New Media Institute is done for and by students. So, they have to develop all the technology from the ground up and that makes it very important for us to work with systems that are easy for our students to understand. We want to emphasize their creativity, not their technical expertise. We think it's very important that we use tools that make it easy for them to focus on the cool things that they want to do and not the details that they are bored by. So, it's very important for us to bring in to make technology more inclusive so that we bring in people who have new creative ideas. They designed a system to work on a pocket PC using browser technology but connecting up with a very easy to use database backend. So, we had a couple of students who understood all the different pieces but a lot of students who understand how they want the system to operate.
One of the coolest projects that our students worked on was just a couple of years ago. We built a wireless cloud over downtown Athens, its called The Wag Zone - the wireless Athens Georgia Zone, and when we built it, we were real excited about the technical experience of putting together a Wi-Fi cloud. But when we brought in students they were really underwhelmed with the infrastructure and they said that they wanted to invent something that you could do with the wireless cloud that they actually wanted to do. So, one of the first projects they came up with was a Friend Finder. They came up with the system that would allow them to use a pocket PC to tell the system where they were and then, whenever everybody else came into downtown Athens, they could find out where all their friends were, that they were a restaurant or a coffee shop or even some other types of establishments that students tend to hang out in downtown Athens. So, this was an application that really addressed some of the important needs in their lives.