Austin Hanson

Wow, what a year.

It’s been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. When school gets a rolling things just keep piling on my to-do list and posting on my blog gets moved to the back burner. For those of you who’ve been using Growlbook, that was another thing that got pushed to the side and I don’t think I’ll be working on it any more. I only made it because I wanted facebook notifications without having the page open but my purchase of the Motorola Droid solved that problem. If you’re interested in picking up development let me know, I’ll ship you the source.

I think that covers “old business”, on to the new stuff.

I got a Droid a while ago and wow – what a great investment. So far, that little investment has netted me around $2500 – who’d have known mobile applications were so…flourishing. If you don’t know, I developed Droidbox, ERS (Event Ringtone Syncer), Texts From Last Night (TFLN) and a few others. I’ve a few other ideas I’m throwing around, including a facebook applications since I’ve yet to find something that does it well. I’ve also gotten involved with a company as the sole developer of something that might very well be huge – I hope it is anyway. That project will most likely steal much if not all of my free time this summer but will be well worth it.

With Droidbox has come a slew of unexpected fortunes, including a number of tech sector contacts in some really large companies that might prove really useful later on in life. I’m a bit disappointed that I was unable to stir interest in Dropbox themselves, either as a buyer of Droidbox or as a possible employer. In fact, I think a lot less of them with their complete lack of response of which I speculate is a result of my degree coming from South Dakota State University and not an “upper tier” university as they request on their website. Good for them I guess, they appear to have done just fine in getting an android developer who has made a subpar duplicate of my Dropbox client. Yeah, I’m bitter but I’ll survive – I’m in a great position with Sencore and don’t think anything with Dropbox would have changed.

My android escapades also gave me the opportunity to learn a ton about advertising. I made a Redbox application that listed promotional codes for free movies and added ad’s (served by AdMob) and saw instant revenue. Things have quieted down now, since Redbox caught on and changed how their codes worked (sorry ) and now the application is useless (despite still netting me ~$70 a month), but the experience has given me a new look on applications and how to monetize them.

I think I’ve done enough rambling. I’m pumped for this summer because I’m at a completely difference place then I was at last year. I feel like I’ve learned so much and have made so much progress in “life” in the past 9 months and am excited to see where things will go.