I am pleased and proud to announce that Big in Japan Inc. is one of 50 finalists Google’s Android Developers Challenge with it’s GoCart™ application.  Of course, the credit really should go to Rylan Barnes, GoCart’s developer.  GoCart was built specifically for Google’s Android mobile phone platform.  GoCart users can easily scan the barcode of any product using their phone’s built-in camera.  Once scanned, GoCart will search the inventories of nearby, local stores using data from the phone’s built-in GPS.  Soon we will port GoCart to the iPhone and enable mobile payments.

Over the past year the Big in Japan team has become more and more involved with mobile applications.  Our initial focus was the iPhone (applications like iPhoneVote), but quickly we began working on Google’s Android mobile phone building a fun application called SocialTones.  Recently we decided to reinvent Big in Japan to focus exclusively on the development of mobile applications.  GoCart is our first serious mobile application with a real business model behind it. The newly incorporated company has three co-founders (including me):

Rylan Barnes co-founded Big in Japan and is the developer of GoCart™, one of 50 winners of Google’s Android challenge.  Rylan started his career at HP where his work on XML-based frameworks was widely acclaimed.  Since then he has worked as a software developer for Vertical Alliance and Software Architects working with AJAX, C# and .NET.

Jason Hudgins co-founded Big in Japan and was on the team that developed Tunewiki, one of the 50 winners of Google’s Android Challenge.  Jason has spent the last eight years developing software for companies including Idearc Media, DeviantART and Ariesnet.

Alexander Muse co-founded Big in Japan.  Alexander is a serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of startup experience. He served as CEO of Architel, a provider of outsourced information technology services. Previously, he was founder and CEO of LayerOne, a ventured backed telecommunications infrastructure company he started in the late 1990’s.