Autobotography Approach – KeeganD

Concept:

Life Chart would be a cross-platform application that tracks how long you spend on various social media sites, application, web-browsing, etc. and breaks it all down for you in an easy to read pie chart. The application also creates an “advertisers profile” on its users, and I would like to incorporate a way in which people have the option of selling that data to retailers.

Content:

In today’s world,  we often spend countless hours a day on our phones and computers, sometimes without realizing it, doing any number of things, both productive and not. As this has become more and more “the norm,” we realize the extent to which we spend our time on certain apps and websites less and less. Life Chart would be a low-power app, constantly running in the background on your phone and computer(s), that simply records what you do while using your devices. When you first open the app, it simply tells you how long you’ve spent staring at a screen in the past day, week, month, year, or since installation.

This is shown in both percentages of time, as the Pie Chart illustrates, and as a total number of hours. Holding on that section brings up a new pie chart that further breaks down that section into large subcategories, such as Social Media, Communication, Web Surfing, Games, etc. Each category of the pie chart can show up to 2 (dependant on the section size) of the most popular apps within it, for a quick glance and whats been taking up the most time in various categories. For example, in the above example, the app is telling us that while looking at screen’s we spend the majority of our time on Chrome and Youtube, while in the below example it tells us that our 2 most used communication apps are FB Messanger and Snapchat, while Google Chrome reigns supreme at 99+% usage within its category.

Tapping on any one of those sections then highlights it and provides a bit of information on that category.

Lastly (not shown), you can hold down on that section, and it expands into a third and final pie chart that shows you how it’s broken up, I.e. “social media” would tell you how long you’ve spent on Instagram, Facebook, etc.  The app would also have a Goals sections, that allows you to define how long you want to spend on a certain category or specific service in a certain time frame, i.e. I only want to spend 20 hours on Twitter this month. The app would then alert the user when they’ve used 25%, 50%, 75%, 90% and 95% of their allotted time.

Function:

This app would allow a new perspective on how we spend our time, and could be used as both just an interesting experiment/analysis of ourselves, as well as to try and help people set and manage goals related to cutting back on technology, and possibly even make a few bucks. I feel an app like this would have huge potential in the consumer marketing sector, as it collects a massive amount of data on the user.

An idea I had while writing this was inspired by a Cryptocurrency project I’ve been following for a while now, called Bitclave. Bitclave has a “coin” out that they call CAT coin, or the “Consumer Activites Token,” and the basic way that the platform works is whenever you make a search or enter any kind of identifying information (anything advertisers or product companies may pay for), you are rewarded with a few CAT coins in exchange for allowing that info to be sold off. It would be awesome to have an OPTIONAL setting, as many care about privacy far more than a few bucks, that would allow you to sell all the data the program collects for CAT coins or a similar system. This would work by Life Chart partnering with a few large advertisers and retail companies, that would basically present offers forever users data based on how valuable the company finds it. Users can then look through a list of offers, and take any that they choose.

This ties perfectly back into the theme of autobiography as well, as one of the biggest examples of our digital selves now-a-days is in the customer profile that has been made up on us in many companies databases. There is already a digital “you” out there, as defined by the people that know how you spend your time with technology, why shouldn’t you have the same breakdown and overview as they, and why shouldn’t you prosper from it? It’s your information after all.

Budget: As an estimate for initial code compiling costs, I’d say around 20-30 hours at 15-20/hr, giving us an initial budget range of 300-600 USD.

Additional expensive would come from two main areas:

1. Advertising, as this app would need at least level of promotion to at least get the ball rolling. Facebook & Instagram ads are easy and super effective, and a $50 budget would probably reach around 20-40k people if the demographics were set right.

2. This would be an app that required consistent updating and support, new categories would have to be added as well as code kept updated to work with the newest version of all the operating systems it runs on, Windows, MacOs, Chrome Os, Linux distros, IOS, Android, Sailfish OS, etc. I can’t really provide an estimate for this as the range is so huge and dependant on so many factors, the largest of which would be how much income we had to finance the updates.