And the winner is ...
Team Wallowr won the RJI-Adobe AIR student competition by designing a product that blends social networking with news sharing. Team members are, from left, Danny Beard, Matt Allen, Nick Leonard and Adam Hosp.
First, the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) asked student teams to use the new Adobe AIR technology to build a desktop application that would help both news organizations and news consumers. Then, RJI asked industry-savvy judges to pick a winner. Finally, RJI asked the public if they agreed with the judges.
Five hundred-plus votes later, the judges and public agree: Team Wallowr is the winner. Team members Adam Hosp, Matt Allen, Nick Leonard and Danny Beard are $11,000 richer ($10,000 for winning the grand prize and $1,000 for the people’s choice award).
The group’s Wallowr AIR application aggregates a variety of social networking tools into one simple spot. Users log in to get all their news and updates from Digg, Reddit, YouTube and other social tools, plus messages from friends and stories from local and national news organizations. Additionally, Wallowr allows users to send pictures, video files and stories to all their friends easily. It also lets them update their address books and personal information. The key is that it does all these things in one place, without sending users to several sites across the Web to make updates and find news. (Read a full description of Wallowr here, and watch a demo video below right.)
For users, Wallowr means convenience. For news organizations, it means a new way to distribute content — plus a recognition that people use social networking to pass news stories around and “endorse” them. There’s value in recognizing that trend.
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Watch Team Wallowr demonstrate its new technology.
“Everybody’s looking for a way to bring the personal, the social and the public together,” says Mike McKean, RJI project leader for the competition. “Wallowr came up with a great product using AIR to do just that.”
How are these industrious students going to spend their prize money? Maybe on a vacation, maybe on some computer upgrades, but definitely on reinvestment in the team’s technology.
“This contest was a great experience,” Beard says. “The money gave us obvious motivation to learn this new technology, and now we have plenty of ideas for future products.”
McKean points out that contest runner-up Team Contributr also delivered a product with great promise for the news business. The Contributr application simplifies the process for news consumers to send and news organizations to receive content — stories, story ideas, photos, videos, etc. In an era when the two-way dialogue between media outlets and their audiences is crucial, Contributr fits the idea of community journalism perfectly. (Read about Contributr here.)
RJI wants to work with both Wallowr and Contributr as the teams take their next steps by introducing them to industry leaders at conferences and by figuring out how best to distribute their products. Likewise, RJI already is developing ideas for future contests to tap into bright student minds.
“I think these students came up with products that could quickly and easily be adapted to the journalism business as it tries to adapt to new realities,” McKean says.