alan wells

Ever since I created the Green Design Wiki, I’ve been interested in exploring the convergence of sustainability and technology. My work at Zynga has given me the knowledge required to orchestrate the production of an iPhone app, and I’ve been on the lookout for interesting ways to use the iPhone platform for environmental benefit. Last year, I did some work with Tim McNeil to help redesign the visitor center for SF Environment, a department of the City of San Francisco. A recent conversation with Tim sparked my memory of SF Environment’s Ecofinder web service. The Ecofinder is a search engine that provides information about where to recycle hard to dispose of goods in the Bay Area. This service seemed like it would be even more valuable – and widely used – if it were accessible from the palm of your hand, anytime, anywhere.

After thinking through idea a bit more, I approached the team at SF Environment about creating an iPhone version of their Ecofinder web service. They agreed to support the project and graciously provided their dataset for use in the app. Since then, I’ve been putting together mockups, designing the application flows and, most importantly, trying to figure out a way to get the application built with a budget of zero dollars. Last week, Andrew and Hernan from Nextive Solutions came through in the clutch and volunteered their time and expertise to create the app. I’m happy to say we started deveopment today, and are hoping have something live in the app store within 6 weeks. More details coming soon.

During the summer of 2007, my roommate Porter Felton and I had an idea about where mobile technology might be going. It was before the release of the iPhone SDK, but the potential of mobile, location aware technology was still very clear. We began working on an idea for a location aware service that would find the most popular events around you based on popularity within your group of friends.

We decided not to pusue the business idea after looking at a number of other companies doing similar things (Loopt, Whirled, etc), but not before I designed and coded a working prototype for nightlife destinations in San Francisco. I learnd basic PHP and MySQL to write this site, which has CSS skins for both iPhone and desktop browsers. You could link it up with your Facebook account to see venues your friends were attending, and see lists of venues ranked by proximity and popularity.

Doing all this in a web browser seems rather quaint now that the iPhone SDK is available, but at the time I wrote the prototype, Safari was the only place for app developers to make iPhone services.

The prototype is still functional (except for the Set My Location address mapping feature), and can be accessed at www.gettoutt.com