OnSite location app wins Opmantek ICT award

Social pic of group of seven at Opmantek Awards
Opmantek winners: The Blink Software team with the judging panel

An application using location technology to enhance safety and security in the mining industry has won the Opmantek Award for high-achieving final year students in Griffith University’s School of Information and Communication Technology.

The app, OnSite, was created by the Blink Software team of Robert Chatfield, Luke Harback and Rhys Williams for their industry client RightCrowd.

By using OnSite on their mobile phones, employees report their locations while at work. The data is securely stored, visualised through a web interface and streamed via PubSubHubbub subscriptions.

Blink Software was one of four Griffith University teams contesting the Opmantek Awards, which are presented twice a year and acknowledge students in the 3001ICT/3002ICT Industry Project course supervised by Dr Peter Darcy at the Gold Coast campus and Dr Leigh-Ellen Porter and Dr Andrew Lewis at Nathan.

Opmantek CEO Mr Danny Maher and fellow judges Cr Glenn Tozer, Associate Professor Bela Stantic and Opmatek CTO Mr Keith Sinclair
Opmantek CEO Mr Danny Maher and fellow judges Cr Glenn Tozer, Associate Professor Bela Stantic and Opmatek CTO Mr Keith Sinclair

The awards are sponsored by Gold Coast-based company Opmantek, which specialises in the development of Network Management Software. The judging panel comprised company CEO Mr Danny Maher, CTO Mr Keith Sinclair, City of Gold Coast’s Councillor Glenn Tozer and Associate Professor Bela Stantic, from the School of ICT.

Joint runners-up were —

Terminal Coding (Mitchell Wenman, Thomas Miller, Matthew Cooper, Sudipta Parh, Blake McIvor) for School of Future Applications (SOFA), a web-based automated enrolment system for future students of the Brisbane School of Distance Education;

MVP Development (Benjamin Hall, Bradley Hunt, Ashley Conroy) for Options Backtester, an advanced data analysis tool designed for financial enterprises. The application accepts user defined custom trading strategies and applies them to 20 years of historical stock market data to identify and analyse trends;

Frontline Technologies (Dennis Malekpour, Lucas Karbanowicz, Rhys Lewis, Nishant Shrestha, Callum Corbett), who developed a mobile eHealth application providing a platform for physiotherapists to improve diagnostic ability and patient service.

Mr Maher praised the level of innovation and expertise demonstrated by the students, saying: “There was very little between the projects. Each exhibited strong client engagement and industry value and the judges pondered long and hard.

“This is good experience for the students. It gives insight into what they can expect when they make the transition from university study to striving for employment and tendering for contracts in the IT world.”