University of Houston, UH Redline

What we did: University of Houston partnered with Ponticlaro to produce a real-time student communication, scheduling, and safety platform with locational awareness.

The University of Houston’s Student Council President approached Ponticlaro to build a mobile app capable of providing up-to-date bus schedules, emergency alerts, campus events, and maps.

In addition, a crowd-sourced data gathering component for available parking was tested to determine if we could model concensus for parking availability from app user participation. Push notifications powered by the University of Houston’s centralized third-party campus alerts system, updates the app with a number of incidents with priorities that range between “notice” and “emergency” every year. It is critical that students are notified in real-time for security and safety, so using the smartphone to provide this service was a large goal of the project.

Ponticlaro architected and engineered a real-time REST API to provide all of this data to the Android and iOS mobile apps, while maintaining the University of Houston’s distributed workflow and pre-existing content management habits , so the internal team was not impacted significantly by the addition of these new student-facing features and interfaces. The straightforward user interface re-inforced the goals of making this information easily available and easily kept up-to-date.

Featuring native push-notifications, mapping, calendar, and wayfinding. Compatible with Android, iPad, iPhone.

Digital Design, iOS Development, Android Development, Sencha Touch Development, Back-end Development