At TunIn we met Andrew Bock, the Sr. Manager. He first took us on tour of the facilities, seen below, and explained some different aspects of the company. TuneIn streams radio stations from all over the world via a phone app or through the browser on your computer. Andrew told us an important thing to note is that schedule information has to be put in manually. Meaning that when you use the site and see a program schedule, much in the way you'd see on your guide on t.v., all that information was put in by hand. It stuck me as one of the few things that I had seen that wasn't completely automated by some kind of algorithm or code running on a machine. I realize the reason for this after speaking with Andrew, the terrestrial analog transmissions being broadcast from the radio stations carry very little meta data. Meta data is kind of a description of the content you might be viewing or listening to. It is often referred to as information about information, but it is basically just a description of content. A really cool side note was that Andrew started his radio career as an intern for the Howard Stern show, when Howard was still at K-Rock.
Our last and final destination of our week long trip was a Target office in San Francisco. Sean Edge was our connection for this trip. He is a Curry alumni who graduated in 2003 and is the Sr. QA lead for mobile development. Our tour of the target office wasn't what I expected. It was much more layed back and had a warmer home feel than I expected. After a tour of the office, were we saw some Targets nested technology development, we were given a brief presentation and then had a Q&A session with Sean. Some of the key points I enjoyed most from our experience at target was hearing about the developments with nested technologies. nested technologies are devices that feature some kind of intelligence, like a refrigerator that knows when your out of milk. It's something Target is keeping a tight lip on, but I'm theorizing that there trying to interface with devices in order to automate the ordering process with their stores or a custom UI which would be device independent and add some other functionality. The oculus technology was really cool too. we were only able to watch a video, but they were using VR to simulate an in store shopping experience with an oculus rift head set. Lastly the app development sounded very interesting. Target is working on (and already has) a number of apps, like cart wheel. These apps stream line the whole shopping experience, with ways to get discounts, find product and ask for in-store assistance right from your phone. They are also working on some kind of augmented reality game using smart phones, which should be interesting to see when they come out.
Per the usual, I will leave you with some pics.
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