The days of waking up to text messages you don’t remember sending and phone calls you don’t remember making are over, thanks to third-year Commerce student Joshua Anton and third-year Engineering student Justin Washington.
Monday evening, Apple Inc. approved their 99 cent app, ‘Drunk Mode,’ which removes selected numbers from a phone’s contact list for up to 12 hours — an effort to curb drunk dials among university students, Anton said.
The idea came to Anton at a block party after he received messages from a drunk friend. He asked around if anybody knew of a way to prevent this from happening, and the answer was a resounding “no.”
“When you send text messages and leave a voicemail, that’s not delete-able,” Anton said in an email. “You can’t erase those actions. The hope is that people can have fun without the drama.”
When Drunk Mode is switched on, those selected phone numbers are temporarily deleted from the contact’s information and cannot be retrieved until the timer expires.
The application also allows users to set reminders to go off every 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes to remind users not to engage in certain “drunk behaviors,” whether it’s drinking and driving or indulging in late night food from Little John’s, Anton said.
The third-years spent 15-20 hours a week for four months developing the app and working on marketing strategies.
“I handled the business development, which included front end development, financing, marketing strategies, communicating the features of the idea into engineering jargon, [and] essentially bring the app to market,” Anton said. “As the lead developer, Justin handled all the IT aspects of the development [including] the technical work, essentially transforming the idea into the product it is today.”
The duo hope to market the application to large universities across the country, particularly schools on Playboy Magazine’s top party schools — a list which the University topped last September. Although it’s currently only available for iPhone users, the team hopes to launch Android and Windows applications June 30.
“We’re going to be making … changes based on the feedback we get for the iPhone feature and try to frequently update it as well,” Washington said. “[We will also] add new features.”
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