Reality related education in Hagenberg

In the fourth semester at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, my project group started creating a mobile flirt application, FastFlirt. The aim of that application was to

• be very easy to handle,
• bring people with similar interests together
• and show good results very quickly.

During our research, we discovered a similar application already available on the market, which had the major flaw to rely on text messaging. A user first has to send the current location and afterwards got information abount people currently at the same place. This might work for static situations, but on train it would fail.

FastFlirt automatically sends Geo information (current GPS data) to a central server and delivers results instantly. One thought we had, was that the great diversity of mobiles and mobile operating systems could be a problem. Not anymore with the new iPhone 3G. And some guys really think that this is the next big thing on a global view:

Basically they consider an iPhone 3G with integrated mobile community support would reshape how we interact with each other. An they are right, why didn’t Apple implement something like that? A google search with relevant keywords doesn’t bring up any good results at all.

Building relationships through electronic devices (facebook, flirt sites,…) has the drawback of beeing very superficial. Most people hardly fill out profiles, and who really maintains profiles on social networking sites on a regular basis? It’s usable to get to know people very quickly, on a basis of a few significant facts as matching music favourites, age, … But how could we push this very basic matching?

The next step of flirt sites (or mobile flirt application) after there was a matching, reading through the suggested profile and maybe sending E-Mails to each other for a certain amount of time, will be to meet in reality and check how reality compares to the virtual impression. At this stage, a lot of time has already been invested in finding out more about each other. And the decision to find out more about a particular person was based on very basic matching facts. Wouldn’t it be better to start from another direction, and match people based on their very personal thoughts, ideas, dreams,…?

A personal web diary application could serve as a framework for this idea. Can you remember what you did four weeks ago? Or two months ago? Or can you see certain topics in your life emerge, as others probably decline in interest? This additional functionality could motivate more people to use that service. In the background, the systems matches people based on their entries.

The difference to ordinary blogs is not obvious: Blogs usually don’t contain the very private thoughts of a person, thoughts you’d maybe not even share with a single other person. In the new system you’d be encouraged to trust it and write down everything you got on your mind though. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said: “Writing stories is one way to get rid of past things”. The service could also be advertised as a tool for your psyche, your mental healthiness.

People can only read other peoples entries if they match on certain topics. And also then, only parts of the entries are accessible. A special feature for premium users could include to be able to read more that just an extract.

Some people might find it useful to not automatically get matched with others, but to decide when they’d like to get matched. “Press the button and find out who’s like you!”.

If you have any ideas, suggetions, interest… in those ideas please let me know.

Be there or be square

‘Be there or be square’ was the headline of a housparty of a friend of mine a few months ago. Well, yes, my last post was quite a time ago. I don’t really liked writing for the past few weeks, what is probably because of your’re getting more and more involved in every day live of where you are: in work-life of my university, private-life with friends, and my life, I’m still kind of on my own. Well, that wont change, I know that there will come the time when it’s time to go.

More and more people are leaving now. Especially the exchange students, who were here for one semester for about 3 months, are leaving for holidays an Australia vacation now. I met some really nice guys, and we probably will catch up in Sydney for New Years Eve. The firework should be great there And if I’m staying in Sydney at this time, I’ll still have a good time. I really love speaking English all day long, it’s getting better and better. Especially when I talk to Germans it’s great to speak a language, where nobody of us is professional. Some of them are trying to speak German, but I don’t really care about German. I love English, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m here, to learn some English. So why speak German? I’m not like those Asian guys grouping together and talking their language all the time. That’s kind of boring. Not just for us, must be boring for them too. As soon as I’m kind of interested in Australians, I have to talk their language, otherwise I’ll fail. And nobodys’s perfect, especially not oversees students

Today we celebrated Kim’s farewell, she’s going to leave for Germany on Tuesday, We’re going to catch up somewhere in Europe probably. Would be quite cool. Some of the guys I met are going to be in Europe for the next semester. So there’s a good chance to meet some of them. Especially the Austrian guys from around Upper Austria. But Germany and Greece is not that far away either. It’s just exciting seeing all those people doing the same thing as so many other people, who already took this step.

By the way, this weekend was about halftime for my internship here. A bit of a summary for the last few weeks:

• We got some search engine log data from a VERY famous computer company.
• For the last few weeks, we’re trying to analyze this data
• To get the data, we proposed a speacial thing to do with the data
• Now we’re kind of running out of time: Just about next week to go, then we have to deliver results
• We, this is are two Lab members, Gavin, Tim, and me.
• So, tomorrow and over the weekend our nice little two Java programs are going to analyze the data
• And at the beginning of next week we hopefully got a nice breakthrough

I’m helping here and there, trying to make things easier for the guys. I feel like an intern, and would never say to be something else. I read papers, but don’t do any serious research, I think about how to solve problems and suggest my ideas, but never really have all the responability to get results. So just how it’s meant to be, it’s great!

This week I got a parcel from Teneriffe. My parents went for vacation, and sent me a book and lollys from there. They also sent some nuts, but Australian Post decided to take out those nuts because of Quarantine reasons. I could send those nuts back to Austria, but it’s about 45 bucks to do this. Well, it’s about half a kilo of nuts, maybe I should do it…

So people, I hope you liked reading another post from Down Under. If you have any ideas, how to make this nice life a bit nicer, let me know. My grandmo is gonna send me some cookies for Christmas, hope those Post guys don’t eat them. And I also expect some Austrian guys on their around the world journey around Christmas, maybe we’re going to a nice island close to Adelaide before. The best thing for them: They probably can stay in my house in a room which is going to be empty for a few weeks. They just stay for a few days, so it should be no problem.

What I just thought of: There are a lot of blogs like this out there, especially about KWM internships around the world (see the link bar to the right). Most of people started to write, when their internship started. But it seems like the longer they do their internship, the less they write. Why’s that? I’d love to read a lot more about your daily life and work. What you’re doing in Vienna, what you’re thinking in Munich. What are you exploring in Stuttgart? And what about Berlin? What’s up in Wisconsin? Some people seem to write quite constantly and provide some insight to their lifes: I know whats up in Canada, and I know what’s going on in Stockholm. But there’s so much more outside. So, guys, please start writing again. I love reading your impressions from home and around the world

Just another little thingy here: FH Hagenberg started again. That means, I have to do some stuff beside my internship over the Internet. That was quite tough in the first days for me. It just sucked. Reading all those posts and then trying to formulate my own opinion to a topic where everything has been said already. But now I’m getting more and more used to it.

To conclude with a questions: When there’s a person outside you are feeling very close to, how do you know what your relationship to this person is or could be? I thought about asking, which I might do. But sometimes words are just boring…

Halloween

German Town in Adelaide

What a nice one

Flowers in Beerenberg

Rrrr

Random party

Aha