What do you get when you mix politics and government with the iPhone? Charles Crossingham, an alumnus and owner of EQV Music Group, recently discovered the answer to this question when he developed his newest iPhone app, iGovernment.
According to Crossingham, this application brings over 50 feeds of news, photos, and videos from departments and offices across all three branches of the federal government “right into the palm of your hand.”
This is not the first app that Crossingham has developed, however. In fact, EQV Music Group, the company Crossingham owns and operates with his business partner, Ian Meyer, specializes in iPhone app development.
“Ian and I began making apps when the software developer’s kit was first released by Apple for the iPhone,” Crossingham said. “We were both long time employees of the Apple Store so we naturally gravitated towards developing for this new piece of hardware.”
The programming language used by Meyer and Crossingham’s business is called Cocoa Touch. This is based on the Cocoa API toolset which is used to develop programs on the Mac OS X.
According to Crossingham, the principal idea behind iGovernment is to provide citizens with an unparallel access to government information and news.
“We feel that there is a lot of pollution in the air when it comes to the way political news is delivered,” Crossingham said.
Christopher Schneider, a freshman in physics, said he’s a bit skeptical, however.
“What’s in an iPhone app that’s not online?” Schneider said.
Some students echo Schneider’s sentiments – at least to some extent. Others said that they can find out what is going on in the government the old-fashioned way: simply by tuning in to one of the various news mediums on television.
Anthony Allen, junior in physics, is such a person.
“I know people who would like to have iGovernment, but I wouldn’t buy it,” Allen said. “I mean, I watch news but I wouldn’t buy an iPhone app that tells me all about the government.”
Another student who wishes to remain anonymous does not trust news feeds by an iPhone application.
“The information is most likely biased and in no way different from any other newscast.”
Crossingham said he feels that the government has always provided great content that could be harnessed more effectively and delivered to a wider audience through a mobile application.
“iGovernment eliminates any middle man and allows you to receive information directly from the source,” Crossingham said.
And reportedly, the sources are the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Federal Courts, NASA, the Department of Defense, Army Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, Coast Guard, State Department, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Department of Energy, the Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
“iGovernment also allows direct support and integration with your email client and Twitter so that you can share your favorite articles instantly,” Crossingham said.
The application was released on Feb. 17 and has since consistently stayed in the top 1% of all “News” applications.
According to Crossingham, the iTunes application store is the ideal environment for selling mobile applications.
“Apple controls 99.4% of the mobile market share,” Crossingham said. “This means that we are part of a marketplace that has sold over 3 billion applications and has over 125 million active iTunes accounts.” Crossingham said he believes that this has the potential to translate into many great things.
“This has been a great achievement for us and we are really looking forward to seeing what the future holds. Last week we were highlighted on NBC-17 about new start-ups in the Triangle and their successes on the App Store,” Crossingham said.
