By Lauren Seo
With four iPhone applications under his belt and one more pending, Ian Cinnamon â10 has taken his love for programming to the bank.
One of his more successful creations is CarFinder.
“Itâll subtract your current location from the location of your car, and then itâll tell you north, east, west, or if youâre already at your car,” Cinnamon said.
It has been recently updated with a cleaner design and an option for users to select the garage level their cars are parked on. CarFinder was originally free when it came out on Aug. 31, but after 1,400 copies were downloaded within 24 hours, Cinnamon decided that it wouldnât hurt to charge 99 cents for it. Since then, his application has been downloaded over 10,000 times, earning him over $2,000.
Cinnamon has recently been contacted by Skyhook Wireless, the company that makes the location system for the iPhone. They will use Carfinder to demonstrate the companyâs systemsâ capabilities to future customers.
Cinammonâs other application, Emergency Distress Beacon, which came out on Aug. 25, allowed him to explore how the online application store works and to develop the code for GPS, which he then used for CarFinder.
He made EDB free since there are free applications at the iTunes applications store with similar functions.
On Sept. 3, CarFinder and EDB were ranked as the seventh and 13th most popular navigation applications at the iTunes applications store out of over 100 applications, respectively.
“When I first started I thought, âOK, maybe 10 or 20 people would download it a day,â” he said. “So it was pretty incredible when I saw the response the applications got.”
