Dedham resident places third in AT&T app competition

Erica Simone’s handy mobile application, UpperClass, can be used to check out buildings on Northeastern University’s campus, get an update on HuskyCard balances, or peruse the school’s sports schedule.

It can also make doing laundry less stressful.

“I wish I had this when I was on campus – it would have been so useful,” says Simone, 22, a Northeastern senior who lives in the Manor section of Dedham. “There were so many times that I would throw in my laundry and run down to the dining hall, and run back to make sure nobody took it out.”

But with UpperClass, which makes the Mac-Gray’s Laundry View program accessible to Simone on her BlackBerry, there is no need to rush. At a glance, she can tell how many minutes each laundry machine has left.

Simone recently won third place in AT&T’s Big Mobile On Campus Challenge for UpperClass, which connects students, faculty, alumni and parents to “key systems” on their BlackBerry, iPhone, or Windows Mobile devices. A professor, for example, could log in and see a list of courses he’s teaching, and a list of his students in a class, Simone says. Her application also hooks users into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Simone, an information science major, won a $5,000 scholarship to help pay for her tuition and a mobile device from AT&T in the national contest.

She came up with the idea for UpperClass last spring while she was working as a co-op for Pyxis Mobile, a Waltham company that “delivers innovative wireless applications” for companies and their customers. During Pyxis’s annual “app from scratch” contest in April, employees were given 24 hours to brainstorm and build an application. Simone says at that point she was registering for classes.

“It just kind of dawned on me, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could do this on my BlackBerry,” she recalls.

Pyxis employees Arun Nagarajan and Marc Rosenbaum helped Simone with the original project – created using Application Studio, Pyxis’s platform for designing apps – before she expanded UpperClass for the AT&T competition. The last day to submit for the contest was Oct. 15, and Simone found out she was a finalist the next day. She gave a presentation Oct. 21, and learned she had won Oct. 23.

“It was definitely all very fast,” she says. “I was very, very, very excited.”

Simone graduated from Dedham High School in 2005, transferring from Bridgewater State College to Northeastern after her freshman year. In the first half of 2008, she was a quality assurance engineer during her first co-op at Pyxis, before returning for a second co-op, in product management, in the first half of this year.

Now, she is back to taking classes at Northeastern, but continues to work part-time at Pyxis – and has been offered a job there as a business analyst, to start after her graduation in May.

Northeastern’s well-known co-op program, short for cooperative education, places students in full-time employment positions for up to 6 months. Students can graduate with up to 18 months of work experience, says Northeastern spokeswoman Katherine Cadwell.

Simone’s year of work at Pyxis, and the connections she made there, Cadwell says, “sort of opened the doors for her, after graduation, to get the job offer.”

Pyxis spokesman Christopher P. Willis says his company quickly sold UpperClass to Northeastern, which is now using it on a pilot basis with some students. AT&T is also selling Simone’s application nationally – a remarkable development for her senior year, Willis says.

“It kind of blows my mind, the situation that’s she in,” he says. “She’s hit a home run with the first thing she’s designed, and we’re psyched to have her on board.”

Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.