Piggyback

MIT Workshop and a new French Challenge

We’ve been contacted by MIT students who are organizing a workshop with all major dynamic ridesharing actors. During this workshop, they hope to answer such critical questions as

• What’s the meaning of life?
• How can dynamic ridesharing reach a critical mass of users?
• Could there be a unified user database, fed through a unified protocol?
• How can we make money with dynamic ridesharing?

We will try to provide our own answers to those questions, but unfortunately we won’t be able to attend. Make sure to visit their website: http://ridesharechoices.scripts.mit.edu/home/

As for our application, we have localized it in French, to take part in a new developer challenge (in French) organized by SFR (Vodaphone) for the upcoming launch of Android in our cheese-loving country.

Stay tuned.

What’s been keeping us busy lately

We are currently developing the web component of our application as well as a simplified Java midlet to work on all sorts of phones, since low-tech phones represent the bulk of the market, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

On a sidenote, I wanted to express my admiration for the guys at XDA Developers who have successfuly managed to make Android run on my beloved HTC Tilt (kaiser/p4450) with working data connection. This is nothing short of amazing.

To conclude, we get many emails asking us when our application will be available for the iPhone. As much as we’d love to port Piggyback to the iPhone, this is not currently possible, technically speaking, since Apple doesn’t allow processes to run in the background of the phone. As long as this technical limitation isn’t lifted, no Piggyback on the iPhone… (added to the FAQ)

Quick update, between Xmas and New Year’s Eve

Piggyback is still making daily progress: we’ve now ordered and received a new G1 from Google, through their Android Devices for Developers program. We were delighted to see our program running on a “real” phone, although it now means that we have to fix the layouts to be useable in landscape mode.

The payment system is also being implemented, as well as a web interface and many other things.

But for now, enjoy the holiday season, and see you next year.

Get Android source code now!

You can now download Android source code from http://source.android.com/

Now please make it work on my HTC Tilt, aka Kaiser II and send me your build… We still don’t have any android phone in our hands and we still desperately need at least one to test our application.