Cooley Godward Associate Develops iPhone App to Link Names and Photos
It’s an awkward situation: You bump into someone you know, but can’t remember his or her name.
It happened to Eric Koester, an associate at Cooley Godward Kronish, at a weekend retreat for would-be entrepreneurs at Microsoft’s campus, according to the Am Law Daily. Koester was there to lend support to companies that emerged at the retreat, but he ended up coming up with a new idea: an iPhone app that connects people’s faces to their names, using photographs from their LinkedIn accounts.
The app, Learn That Name, connects to your LinkedIn account to pull a photo from a list of contacts, according to the Wall Street Journal Digits blog. You are then asked to name that person, and given a list of four names from which to choose. Points are awarded for a correct match, more points are doled out for doing it quickly, and even more points are given for correctly identifying the person’s employer.
Koester worked with a team of 14 people attending the retreat to develop a prototype within 24 hours, according to the Am Law Daily.
The app is now available for $1, but the price will soon rise to $2, according to Digits. Apple will get 30 percent of the royalties, and the team members will share in the rest. Koester expects each group member to make about $7,000 total; he plans to keep his day job.
“I definitely would like to continue doing this as a hobby, but it’s not as glamorous as people think,” he told the Am Law Daily. “You don’t just hit it big like with a Google or Microsoft.”
