Brian Payst on May 18th, 2011

The m.unc.edu site that we run has been sitting on the old MIT code for some time now. I’ve been working in my spare time (misnomer if there ever was one) to update the site to the new Kurogo framework. The folks that developed the MIT code have now gone and started their own company [...]

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Brian Payst on June 25th, 2009

The new UNC mobile site has made huge progress in the last month. Live now at m.unc.edu, the site works with iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and many other phones. We have added a growing list of news items and event feeds, links to the UNC YouTube channel (and initial plans to make [...]

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Brian Payst on February 25th, 2009

We ran a test of Alert Carolina recently and have some real world SMS delivery numbers that I think are worth a post. We sent a little over 24,000 messages in slightly more than 7 minutes. A key metric in that is that we sent almost 80% of the messages by the second minute and [...]

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Brian Payst on June 3rd, 2008

Techcrunch has an interesting post about an apparently upcoming iPhone social network app. I agree with much of what he is saying, but I think the real killer app here will be someone combining the rich connected experience of the iPhone with the user capital of facebook, myspace, etc. Although people seem to be willing to [...]

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Brian Payst on February 29th, 2008

Students shun cell phone alerts

COLUMBIA, MO. – The massacre at Virginia Tech last year sent colleges nationwide scrambling to improve how they get alerts to students during crises on campus. One solution: text messages sent to cell phones.
But while hundreds of campuses have adopted text alerts, most students are not embracing them, even when they [...]

Continue reading about Going at this the wrong way?

Brian Payst on February 28th, 2008

Abilene Christian University is giving an iPhone or iPod touch to incoming students. It’s good to be a small school sometimes, so much flexibility. Although it remains to be seen if this is truly implemented and picked up. Duke made a lot of noise with its iPod initiative, but the program was scaled back [...]

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Brian Payst on February 7th, 2008

OK, so can we start caring about Mobile now?
http://mashable.com/2008/02/07/facebook-mobile-operators-vodafone/

Facebook mobile director Jed Stremel acknowledges that network members have encountered a large number of “hang-ups,” “login problems” and other bugs through the use of handheld browsers, and because the number of individuals seeking to make connections with the site on the go has purportedly grown [...]

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Brian Payst on January 7th, 2008

Facebook, Myspace, social networks in general are getting all the attention these days and much of it is deserved. There is certainly at least a short-term shift in what the web is and how we interact with it. How long we stay in the social networking phase is certainly an open question and we definitely [...]

Continue reading about Why I care about mobile