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Appcelerator Unveils Oil Reporter Mobile App to Aid Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Recovery EffortMay 31, 2010 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Appcelerator, a platform for developing native mobile, desktop, and iPad applications using web technologies, announced that Appcelerator Titanium would power Oil Reporter for Android and iPhone. According to a release, the mobile app was created for Crisis Commons by Intridea, using Titanium's cross-platform technology. Oil Reporter enables trained citizen journalists to use their mobile phones to capture and upload quantitative and qualitative data, as well as geo-tagged photos and videos to help in the recovery effort. Appcelerator also announced that it has started a volunteer mobile application developer recruitment initiative initially targeting its 47,000 application developers. Volunteer developers will aid NGO organizations in building applications to pinpoint damaged areas based on Oil Reporter geo-tagged data. The April 20 explosion aboard the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico caused a massive spill, sending untold thousands of barrels of oil per day into the Gulf. Now that the spill has hit shore, mobile phone users can provide important eyewitness accounts to help public sector response organizations track and respond more swiftly to the crisis. "With a quick-moving crisis such as the Gulf Coast oil spill, every second that oil is spilling into the Gulf counts," said Jeff Haynie, CEO at Appcelerator. "By enabling Intridea and Crisis Commons to quickly create a mobile app that lets users of today's most popular smartphones report first-hand damage, we are hopeful that aid workers can stem the tide of this massive spill and reduce its harmful effects." "When Crisis Commons came to us to build the Oil Reporter app, we knew we wanted to build on Appcelerator," said Brendan Lim, Director of Mobile Development at Intridea. "With Titanium, we used our web skills to build a rich, interactive native app for iPhone and Android in just a few days. This application could not have been otherwise developed on both platforms in such a tight timeframe. We anticipate developers will leverage Oil Reporter's crowdsource data and Appcelerator's open source app creation platform to create many more innovative mashups and apps that will assist recovery efforts." Appcelerator announced that it will tap its 47,000 Titanium Developers to ask for volunteers to collaborate with governmental institutions and animal rescue organizations. Recruited developers will be matched up with these organizations for a coordinated joint effort to better identify hotspots for crisis mitigation and protection of the natural environment, wildlife, etc. Oil Tracker, a complementary heat map app that will be made available for iPhone, Android, and iPad leverages Google Maps and Oil Reporter wildlife data to show where there is the greatest concentration of dead or dying wildlife. Oil Tracker is being open-sourced to the development community along with Oil Reporter. Using crowdsourcing on the front end and a mobilized development effort on the backend enables an effective, online data collection and dissemination mechanism, so that organizations can have better insight and make better decisions to assign task forces to handle such a crisis. This level of collaboration by crisis response organizations, such as Crisis Commons, governmental agencies, technology vendors, and developers represents a bigger, broader effort at how harnessing technology can enable a more effective response to a national crisis. To further support the recovery effort, Appcelerator will donate 100 percent of the first month's proceeds to the National Wildlife Federation for any developer who signs up for a Titanium Professional subscription. Developers can sign up at http://bit.ly/aPiglu and use promo code: "savethegulf". Appcelerator is now taking volunteer developer signups to customize building a mashup with Oil Reporter through the following website: http://bit.ly/bJPP01. Volunteers will be matched up with other NGO organizations over the next few weeks. Appcelerator enables web developers, ad agencies, ISVs, and enterprises to take advantage of the explosive growth in mobile, desktop, and iPad applications. The company's flagship offering, Titanium, is an open source platform to enable cross-platform development, from a single codebase, at web development speed for these three platforms. More information: www.appcelerator.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) |