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Ole Miss students use technology to create app that tracks local bars
Posted on Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 7:14 pm
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Profile 2024: Ole Miss students use technology to create app that tracks local bars
Alyssa Schnagel
Senior reporter
There seems to be an app for everything today, and tech-savvy minds are using the technology to forge a path into the future, bringing knowledge from countless disciplines to the fingertips of everyone with a mobile phone.
By the time he was 18, Julian Bourgeois had already developed two new apps. While still in high school, he created an app for the Apple Watch that tracked basketball shots. He came up with the idea for a new app while out in Oxford in August after arriving at the University of Mississippi as a freshman.
“When I got here, I immediately noticed the problem with how high the bar cover was, but I didn’t take immediate action,” he said. “Then an Uber driver friend of mine said, ‘Hey, what if there was a way to track bar covers? That got me thinking.”
After extensive research, Bourgeois decided to develop his new app, Crowd Cover, which uses crowdsourcing technology to allow users to see how much a bar’s cover charge is, whether they need to wait in line and how crowded the bar is. The bar might be.
Crowdsourcing is a technology where users on an application input information and, based on a general consensus of that input, the application delivers the information to other users.
In September, Crowd Cover was released for iPhone on the App Store, allowing Oxonians, tourists and Ole Miss students to see which bars are charging cover and whether they need to wait before entering the restaurant or bar.
“It was an immediate sensation,” Bourgeois said. “In the first month, we had 10,000 downloads.”
Bourgeois grew up in Metairie, Louisiana, and attended Haynes College. There, he participated in basketball and baseball until an injury occurred during his sophomore year.
“During my recovery, I became more interested in exploring programming and took more structured programming classes,” he said. “Using the skills I learned, I developed a basketball app for the Apple Watch.”
In November, Bourgeois enlisted the help of Ole Miss commit Larson Carter, who now serves as Crowd Cover’s technical chief. Carter and Bourgeois were both computer science majors, and Carter also took an entrepreneurship course for his minor.
Carter, 19, a sophomore, has been working on developing new features for the app that would allow restaurant and bar owners and managers to provide service charges and other information for inclusion in the app.
“We are expanding our feature set to make it more interactive for our customers,” Carter said. “We’re making the app even more powerful.”
He is from Jonesboro, Arkansas and graduated from Valley View High School. “[My interests]have been influenced by my father for as long as I can remember,” Carter said.
He has extensive experience in computer network and mobile application development, and as his skills developed over time, he focused on DevOps. He began researching the concept of an “official partner bar” during his freshman year at Ole Miss.
The two are also working on making the app eventually available for Android phones and iPhones.
“We do plan to include Android devices in a later release,” Carter said. “We’re trying to get a lot of functionality stable first before we add another device structure to our umbrella.”
The app currently tracks bars in 11 cities, most of which are home to SEC academies, including New Orleans, Auburn and Starkville.
Bar owners and managers who want to work with Crowd Cover to provide information can send them an email. The app is available for free download on the App Store.
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