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Three SI students launch mobile tech startup
(Oct 2008) What did you do this summer? Three MSI students spent their summer launching a tech startup with funding from an Ann Arbor-area venture capital firm.
Troubadour Mobile is the collaborative brainchild of MSI students Gaurav Bhatnagar, Adam Torres, and Hung Truong.
The fledgling software company's stated goal is simple: "to have your mobile phone predict the future."
While perhaps not giving your phone psychic powers, the three entrepreneurs are dreaming up applications to make your cell phone or other mobile device smarter, more helpful, and more seamlessly connected to the vast stores of data available online.
"What we picture," Bhatnagar said, "is you turning to your phone, and having it help you decide how to use your time at any given moment."
If you're looking to decide how to use your dinner time, Troubadour's first application may help. It's a location-aware restaurant directory service for the Apple iPhone that uses the phone's GPS data to pull results and reviews from an online directory service. It's expected to be in the iPhone App Store this fall.
Beyond responding passively to your queries, the situation-aware mobile device Troubadour envisions will draw its own inferences. "We want your phone to figure out what state you're in and give you things to do based on that information," Truong added. And by "state" he doesn't mean simple geography. The team wants to develop software that will let your phone recognize patterns in your behavior, making it aware of your habits and routines. It might, for example, recognize that you are commuting home from work based on your location, movement, time of day, and history. It could then prompt you with possible next tasks: Call your spouse to say you're on your way? Order Chinese food from the take-out place you'll pass 10 minutes from now?
The story of the company's launch this past summer says much about the fertile nature of SI and the sorts of students it attracts.
Truong needed to write a business plan for SI 663, "Entrepreneurship in the Information Industry," taught by Associate Professor Victor Rosenberg (himself the founder of the highly successful ProCite bibliography software company). Needing names of company officers to include in the report, he listed those of classmates Bhatnagar and Torres.
Soon after that a call came out for applications for the "RPM-10" contest. RPM Ventures, an Ann Arbor based venture capital firm, had partnered with several other area organizations to launch a competition to find promising local startups and nurture them over a 10-week summer period.
Truong saw the solicitation and worked with Bhatnagar and Torres to develop the SI 663 business plan into an RPM-10 proposal.
Because the plan was still fairly amorphous and they had little in the way of trial product to point to, the trio closed the deal largely on the strength of their own experience, skills, and past projects, including their SI portfolios.
RPM provided the nascent company 10 weeks of funding, office space, mentoring, and even legal and banking services, helping get them incorporated, for example. (The banking connection got them some unexpected publicity: they made it into a Bank of Ann Arbor television commercial as one of the bank's cool new customers.)
All good things come to an end, but though the 10-week summer support has ended, the Troubadour Mobile group expects to continue its relationship with RPM, and to continue developing software as time allows. As the fall term approached, they were particularly looking forward to integrating their entrepreneurial experience with their classroom work.
Torres noted, "I really can't wait for 682," a reference to Assistant Professor Mick McQuaid's "Interface and Interaction Design" course. In addition to being eager to add to his knowledge in interface design, Torres hoped to integrate his Troubadour Mobile work into course projects.
Truong, whose software development experience had previously been in the area of Web applications, was looking forward to applying his new device-application experience to his coursework. "It will be really interesting to go back to class with a different perspective," he said.
The entrepreneurial spirit is apparently alive and well at the School of Information. "SI does a good job of just encouraging students to do cool stuff like this," said Bhatnagar, "to do their own thing."
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Gaurav Bhatnagar, Adam Torres, and Hung Truong
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