To promote innovation, community service, and career development among UC Berkeley students, CITRIS sponsored a semester-long competition for undergraduate and graduate students to develop mobile apps for social impact. Over the course of the spring 2014 semester, more than 50 students across 13 teams developed apps in the following categories:
- Healthcare
- Energy & Climate
- Disaster Preparedness & Response
- Civic Engagement
- Education
On Tuesday, May 6, all 13 student teams presented during a Public Demo Day event to a social-minded panel of judges that included investors, entrepreneurs, and academics. The event culminated in an expo of the students’ apps and presentation of awards to the following teams:
- Judges’ Overall Prize: WattTime Shift
- Social Impact Prize: Prescribd
- Most Improved Prize: MoodStreamer
- Public Vote Prize: Two Cents
Congratulations to both the winners and all the participants! We’d also like to thank all our judges for their time and feedback to the students: Michael Berolzheimer (Bee Partners), Larry Rosenthal (Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement), Rich Levinson (BrainAid), Tejpal Chadha (eGain) and Camille Crittenden (CITRIS).
Meet the Winners
Judges’ Overall Prize
WattTime Shift
WattTime Shift lets you know where your power is coming from at a given time and place, so you can choose to use power from sources which match your own personal environmental choices.
L-R: Camille Crittenden (Deputy Director of CITRIS), Nick Firmani, Gavin McCormick and Anna Schneider from WattTime
Social Impact Prize
Prescribd
Prescribd simplifies the process of prescription fulfillment. With 97% of web- based pharmacies operating illegally, our goal is to establish ourselves as a convenient, mobile-based pharmacy that consumers can trust.
L-R: Evan Fossier, Bryan Siber and Howard Wu from Prescribd. Larry Rosenthal from Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement.
Most Improved Prize
MoodStreamer
MoodStreamer seeks to improve mental health care by providing finer-grained data and analytics to psychiatrists. This is done passively data mining SMS messages and behavior surveys. With this app mood surveys are only needed in the first few weeks to train computational models. After that data is automatically collected and assessed without need for user input.
L-R: Rani Yadav-Ranjan (mentor), Oriana DeMasi and Sid Feygin from MoodStreamer.
Public Vote Prize:
Two Cents
Two Cents is a mobile app that allows users to donate two cents to natural disaster relief or world causes such as poverty, hunger, and water. Any user who has the mobile app can bump his or her phone with a friend’s phone to encourage him or her to join the cause.
L-R: Emily Chen, Shyam Kumar and Maruchi Kim from Two Cents. Claudia Willis from AT&T. (Not pictured: Quinn Z Shen)
Our mobile application addresses the socioeconomic and political problems with education and integrates them into a single experience that accounts for the user’s personal and academic needs, allows exploration of educational options and resources, and links the user to friends and educators.
HandiRoute is an application designed to help disabled people navigate through towns, colleges, etc. It does this by crowdsourcing data about disabled friendly access areas and modifying conventional navigation routes with this information in mind.
This app is about changing how everyone thinks about weather and climate by making it personal and local. By comparing today’s weather with historical climate records we can tell you if the weather you’re experiencing today is normal or if it’s… weird.
Occuhunt is modeled after the three most important steps of the job application process – discover, prepare, and apply. All jobhunting documents are stored online, making Occuhunt the central go-to repository for professional documents.
Transportation accounts for 28% of US GHG emissions. Our app will automatically track commute modes and aggregate them for the employer. This could measure the impact of incentives, and also provide a social component to motivate change.
Flare is a location-based disaster precaution and response resource to assist users and Emergency Response Teams during natural disasters and emergencies. Users can also self-report situations and locations to local Emergency Response Teams.
MedMinders
Oftentimes people forget to take their medications, the effects of which can be detrimental and possibly even deadly. We plan to create a mobile app that easily manages medication doses and reminds the user exactly when to take each dose.
Our app aims to bring new ideas to life by connecting people with great ideas to those who can help make them happen. We hope to build a place where people can collaborate and voice their interest in new ideas, motivating developers to make things that really matter.
Picknic is a rewards program for eating fresh and staying active, making being healthy fun and easy. Earn points every time you purchase produce or get active at one of our local business partners and use them to redeem free groceries and fitness classes.