Androids, iPhones Prepped for Battle in Army’s First-Ever App Contest
By Katie Drummond
August 4, 2010 4:58 pm
Unleash the iPhones of war! The Army’s announced the winners of its first-ever mobile phone app development contest. And the general behind the program says some apps will be in the field “within a year.”釋放 iPhone的戰爭！陸軍宣布第一次手機應用開發大賽的獲獎者。而項目背後的將軍說，一些應用將“會在一年之內”在戰場上。
A total of 141 soldiers and Army civilians participated in the contest, called Apps for the Army, or A4A, which launched on March 1. Participants designed a total of 53 applications, mostly for Androids and iPhones, in five different categories. Twenty-five apps were short-listed and cleared for deployment, with first-prize winners in each category taking home $3,000.
共141名士兵和軍隊平民參加比賽，被稱為給軍隊的應用，或A4A，它在3月1日推出。參加者共設計了53宗申請，主要在5個不同的類別用於機器人和iPhone。 25項應用程序被短期上市版及清除作部署，各組別的冠軍帶回家3,000美元。
“This portends a different way in which we hope to develop tools for the military in the future,” Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson tells reporters. “This eliminates requirement documentation, solicitations, and the rest of the bureaucratic acquisition process that really slows us down.”
The overall winners ranged from a workout guide to an app for disaster relief efforts that allows users to search, create and edit maps using Google Earth. But in terms of battlefield utility, the most important app may be the “Sigacts” program for the iPhone. It lets a soldier tap into the Army’s futuristic command post software (called, I’m not kidding, “Command Post of the Future“) and learn about bombings and firefights in his area.
The app was developed by a team led by Major Greg Motes. They are also the contest’s first-place winner, “Physical Readiness Trainer.” Motes says his goal was to break down “a wall of text” into something more accessible. “I heard a general comment on a new fitness manual being circulated, and it was 400 pages long,” he told reporters. “We didn’t want to drop a PDF into an app, so we sat down and broke the guide down, added multimedia.” The team incorporated exercise pictures, videos and a search function to make the fitness guide user-friendly.
Lt. Gen. Sorenson says the Army plans to host more contests, and that plans are also underway to collaborate with commercial developers. But while A4A marks an impressive openness to streamlined development and new computing platforms, Sorenson acknowledges the Army’s still working out some kinks.
“We’ve yet to figure out adequate security encryption for iPhone and Androids,” he says. This makes the gadgets off-limits for most soldiers on the battlefield. And while the apps are already available for download online (sorry, Department of Defense Common Access Card holders only), some had to be taken down after the Army realized developers had used Wikipedia content without acknowledging copyright.
Already, though, the Army’s got a leg up on Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm. The agency’s also working on battlefield applications, but their program, “Transformative Apps,” was shot down by the House Armed Services Committee in May. The committee noted that Sorenson’s leadership offered “a closer understanding of the warfighter’s needs and requirements.”
“What we wanted to do here was simple,” Sorenson says. “We wanted soldiers to create something that, from their perspective, could be useful for the Army. Something they’d actually use.”
And even though the apps haven’t quite hit the war zone, Sorenson’s already anticipating improvement. All the apps will be open source, “so if someone else wanted to take a look, add changes and re-host it, we would certainly welcome that.”
Photo: U.S. Air Force
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/androids-iphones-prepped-for-battle-in-armys-first-ever-app-contest/
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