HSA Releases New iPhone Application

Even Harvard’s most directionally-challenged may never get lost in the Square again.

Harvard Student Agencies recently launcher Rover, a free iTunes application that provides users with the locations of hundreds of restaurants and stores in the Cambridge-Boston area.

Rover also gives users live access to numerous deals and discounts in the Square exclusive to Rover users.

The application, available for use on the newest versions of the Apple iPhone and iTouch, uses the Unofficial Guide to Student Life at Harvard, a guidebook published by HSA, as its main source of information.

The book has reviews of over 900 establishments in Cambridge and Boston.

“There are lots of good reviews, but would you ever bring a guidebook with you when you went out?” said Winston X. Yan ’10, co-creator of Rover.

Rover uses GPS to pinpoint locations of interest according to the user’s specifications. It sorts all hits by distance from the user and displays relevant contact information for the selected establishment as well as maps of the surrounding area.

Rover follows in the vein of similar iTunes applications at Duke and Stanford, but, according to co-creator Alexander G. Bick ’10, “Stanford and Duke have applications that are more focused on student academic life than student social life”—providing an interface to access grades, on-campus happenings, and other campus-based information.

“From the outset we tried to take the great content that is in the Unofficial Guide and make it more easily usable, searchable, and accessible for students as opposed to focusing on student academic life,” Bick said.

Bick and Yan came up with the idea for Rover one year ago while visiting London.

“We were both doing research in Europe, and when we got together, we realized how useful it would be to have a guidebook on a cell phone instead of in paperback form,” Bick said.

Bick and Yan, engineering and physics concentrators, respectively, used the programming knowledge they learned in Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science I” to design the application.

Rover won the Campus Services Ventures category of HSA’s I3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge last year and was subsequently picked up to be a subdivision of the agency.

The I3 Competition selects Harvard’s most innovative business ventures and inventions, created by undergraduates, and provides them with the monetary, technical, and legal support needed to get their ideas off the ground.