Rave Wireless: Park University student uses Rave toolkit to create mobile application for textbook exchange
Jun 2, 2008
Framingham, MA: Rave Wireless, Inc. today recognized Park University student Rodrigo Neri for his creation of the “myBooks Sale” application for the Rave Campus platform. The “myBooks Sale” application allows Park University students to buy, sell and exchange used textbooks throughout the campus community. Mr. Neri built the application with the Rave Extender toolkit that is part of the Rave Campus mobile application suite. Rave Campus allows colleges and universities to deploy a core set of packaged mobile applications for safety, mobile learning and student services, while allowing members of the campus community to build their own applications on the platform.
"Students live their lives totally on the go and we can use mobile applications that make our busy lives easier," said Neri. "When I heard about the Rave Wireless Development Competition I thought this was the perfect opportunity for me to create something that solved a student problem while helping Park University make its mobile offerings even more useful for students. Pretty soon our lives will be centered around mobile devices, so it's important to think about the types of tools that are most useful on those devices. Rave Wireless has a great sense of this trend and it's fun to work with their development toolkit."
As colleges and universities look to build upon their text alerting capabilities to mobile-enable all aspects of campus life, one key challenge universities face is finding packaged functionality that fits the university mission out-of-the-box, while still allowing the university to innovate and leverage its own people to create a truly customized mobile experience. The Rave Extender toolkit allows users to connect to the Rave messaging API so that new or existing applications can be easily enabled with text alerting. In addition, the toolkit allows users to add new mobile web applications to the set of pre-packaged applications within the Rave framework. In the Park University example, the student-created textbook exchange application now lives alongside course registration and grades, daily calendar and school email, all from the web browser on students' mobile phones.
The textbook exchange application at Park University will allow students to post used textbooks for sale, find a needed textbook, and schedule a safe time and place to meet the buyer/seller to complete the transaction. As the used textbook marketplace is a dynamic and fast-changing world, having instant access to such tools from the mobile phone and being able to receive a text alert when an appropriate match is available is of great value to students on the go.
“Rave Wireless is founded on the belief that mobile applications will be the backbone of a productive society,” said Tom Axbey, CEO of Rave Wireless. “Colleges and universities are a microcosm of the world in general. They reflect the needs and behaviors of many other types of communities. What we're seeing is a hierarchy of needs for mobile experience that begins with safety and then extends into personal development and convenience. It's great to see someone with Rodrigo's sense of innovation building value upon the Rave mobile application platform.”