Wow! Emerson Walker is only 14 years old and he’s already creating an iPad app.
Emerson was at school one morning and forgot to bring his planner. He looked at his iPad and wondered why no one had created an app that turned your boring old paper planner into an organized iPad app. Well rather than be the one that sat around and did nothing, Emerson decided that he would be the one to turn the paper planner into an iPad app.
After some thinking, Emerson came up with mPlanner; a iPad app that synchronizes your schedule with school content management sites like Schoology and Blackboard. The app would completely eliminate the need for a paper planner and would reduce time spent writing out your schedule for the year.
Following his brainstorming session, he started crafting his idea of mPlanner into a mockup of what he wanted the app to look like. He then pitched the idea at Cincinnati startup weekend and won first-place competing against adults! Emerson was rewarded a workspace at CintriFuse’s Sixth Street office suites, a startup accelerator.
Although Emerson’s app idea won the eyes of investors, he decided he would fund the development of his app using the crowdsourcing tools of Kickstarter.com. Doing this would allow Emerson to maintain creative control over the app and also allow him to provide his finished app to the open source community.
So on July 15th, Emerson launched is KickStarter project with a goal of $5,000 dollars to cover hiring app developers. Emerson ended up making $6,302 in only a 30 day period.
Emerson now plans on hiring a company called, INTERalliance of Greater Cincinnati, a firm which hires high school students that are experienced app developers and programmers.
Read the complete article on the Business Courier and check out Emerson’s website where you can sign up to hear more about mPlanner when it is released to the public.
Carol Topp, CPA
