Its been a long time no post on the blog! But things have been happening and I will be slowly updating the posts over here.
The MRC has recently launched the CRIG scheme where a private company can apply for research and development grant jointly with a collaborating academic/institution. The proposals should be for innovative, collaborative research and development projects with commercial potential.
I have been working with the Uptoten Ltd company, which is mainly a fun based learning website for kids and Uptoten Ltd has submitted a project for funding to the MRC. The collaborating institution is the UoM and I am the Principal Investigator of the project along with my colleague Roopesh Sungkur from the Computer Science Department. The project has been accepted in principle for funding and the last step is being awaited to finalise the process.
The technical abstract of the proposal is as follows:
UpToTen.com is a kids fun learning website with a worldwide visibility deriving its major traffic from France, the US, Canada and India. The main problem is that in 2014, 80 percent of the new visitors to the site access it via a tablet or a Smartphone. Given that the site is mainly in Flash and not tablet-compatible, such visitors spend only an average of 2 minutes and visit only 2 pages maximum on the site prior to opting out of it, compared to an average of 15 minutes and 15 pages when the site is accessed on a desktop/laptop computer. UPTOTEN is currently struggling to maintain its customer base due to the exponential growth of tablet utilisation among its primary customers. The aim of this project is to develop a rapid methodological process that can be applied on a large scale to re-adapt flash-based games to mobile mainly tablet-based environments. This will eventually help in improving the financial sustainability of the company by retaining its customer base through the development of a redesigned product that is responsive to their needs that is a tablet-compatible environment.
