The back story

February 11, 2013:

First small group meeting (SGM) for my CS 210 team. CS 210 (Software Project Experience with Corporate Partners) is a two quarter-long sequence of classes that fulfills the senior project requirement for CS majors at Stanford. My team was sponsored by SAP, a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation that provides enterprise software solutions, and we called ourselves the "Socially Awesome Penguins" (or "SAPenguins" for short). Cute, right? I came up with that name.



On February 11, we were just coming away from a pretty disappointing reception by a panel of venture capitalists on our first product idea - mobile-to-mobile screen sharing. The VCs (invited by the excellent Jay Borenstein to provide expert opinions to all the project teams in the class) called our concept uninspired and unambitious. They thought we had a lot more potential to do something great.

So in that SGM, we committed as a team to seeking out fresh, new project ideas to present to our corporate liaisons from SAP on February 20. We ditched the screen sharing idea, and we ditched all the other half-baked ideas that screen sharing had beat out over the last month. After a week-and-a-half of intense brainstorming, featuring a couple long and arduous team brainstorming sessions in Old Union, we settled on presenting our liaisons with two new ideas - code-named "SmartSense" and "TechM."

February 20, 2013:

Long story a little bit shorter, SAP liked the "SmartSense" idea better because it tied in with the project theme they had originally given us - letting the mobile device become a proxy for the identity and/or context of a human user. "SmartSense" gradually evolved into "Around the Corner" and became our final project direction - essentially, a mobile application that allows users to observe and utilize the paths along their daily commutes to find new venues they haven't discovered yet, despite passing by these venues all the time, despite them being "around the corner."


"TechM" did not connect to the SAP project theme, and given that they were our financial backers, it was reasonably tossed out without further thought. But "TechM" was my brainchild from the marathon brainstorming sessions, and I still saw great potential in the idea. This senior project class was not to be the right platform for turning this idea into a product, and so I am free pursue it as an individual.

Read more about the vision behind TechM.