Music Apps Take Top Prizes in U of Maryland Contest

One day, Megan Monroe was walking across the University of Maryland campus with her headphones on.

She saw other students walking nearby with their headphones on. And they didn't do anything except stare straight ahead. They were in the music zone.

"You can't help but think, 'What are they listening to?'" said Monroe, a graduate student in the Computer Science Department.

She intended to find out. Monroe and senior computer science major Jonathan Speiser developed an iPhone app and website called Jam My Jam for the university's first mobility app development contest. With the app, students — or jammers — don't have to listen to their music in isolation anymore. Instead, listening to music can become social and interactive.

Last week, the university announced the winners of the mobility contest. And the top two slots went to music-related apps.

The music apps

Jam My Jam won first place and a prize of $3,000. The crowdsourced juke box app Atmo won the $2,000 second place prize. And Tell The Terps, which allows users to report campus problems, won third place and a prize of $1,000.

"Not only were the two really strong apps music-related, but it was clear that people related to them, and they got a lot of good feedback all around," said Ben Bederson, the contest chair and associate professor in the Computer Science Department. 

The students think differently than the campus staff members who work on mobile support. And that's one of the reasons the university wanted to involve them in the app contest, which is part of a broader mobility initiative that started in 2008 to explore how mobile technology can improve campus life.

That's also one of the first lessons in the field of human-computer interaction: You aren't your user.

"Different people have different perspectives," he said, "and if you want to understand what's important to people, you have to involve the people that you care about."

For example, music is no longer a major part of Bederson's life. But music is important to college students, and he had forgotten that. As the top two apps in the contest showed, students want a way to make listening to music more social.

Atmo already has a place in the bowling alley at the student union on campus. Instead of just listening to whatever music someone decides to play, students can vote on what music they want to play next. Computer science graduate student Randy Baden developed this application and has taken it to the next level by starting a business with MBA student David Croushore.

Jam My Jam has about 100 users on campus so far, and its creators are looking for more. In order to make their jamming social, students turn on the app, hit shuffle on their phone, and put it back in their pocket.

On the website, anyone can get a feel for the music vibe of the campus. A campus map shows where the jammers are and what they're listening to. If you want to hear what they're listening to, you can click on the YouTube links next to the songs.

"That was sort of the big step that took it from 'this is kind of neat' to 'people are actually using this to find new music,'" Monroe said.

The lessons

While this was a contest, the mobility committee organized it like a semester-long class with five deadlines for different pieces of the project. And from October through March, faculty members gave students feedback and met with groups that needed technical help.

Through the contest, students came up with good ideas to improve campus life, learned more about mobile technology and how to use it innovatively, and worked together on interdisciplinary teams (except for the second-place winner who went solo).

The technical skills students learned while developing these native and Web apps are important, Bederson said.

"But I think it's at least as important to think about what makes an innovation successful, and it goes way beyond the technology of creating something that works."

The students needed to find a problem that people care about and a solution to it. They also needed to figure out who the users are, what the market is and how they're going to grow their user base.

For example, some of the apps submitted in the contest were good, but they didn't solve the network effect. In other words, they needed to have a lot of people using them before they were useful. On the other hand, the winning apps all were useful even with a small number of people.

Years ago, certain kinds of technical development required expensive computers and software. But today, these resources are free or cheap and widely accessible.

"I highly encourage lots of campuses and contests to do this kind of thing," Bederson said. "It doesn't take a lot of resources; it takes a little bit of time and effort, and there's great benefit. So it's another part of the way that modern computing and low costs change what's possible to do."