Tourism has been increasing in Manitoba over the past years. Entrepreneur, Simone Allard, saw an need for an application that could feature different historical sites and landmarks found in Manitoba Municipalities. Currently users would have to go to multiple tourism websites for more information about a site giving very little information on them.

Our ACE Project Space students created a web based application that will act as a central hub for all municipalities in Manitoba. This application is a way to motivate users to go out and explore sites and events found in municipalities. Users will be able to navigate to different sites and events, plan their own trips within the app, or follow pre-made trips. This will also increase the tourism helping a municipality’s economy. Read More →

Screen Capture of RoofBundle website.

The majority of roofing companies in the industry are making their employees draw a sketch of a roof based on measurements taken for at least 75 percent of the roofs that are contracted to be built or repaired. Once this process has been completed the roofers need to take the data they have complied as well as the sketch and upload it into a system that the company is using.

Entrepreneur-In-Residence, David Peters, realized this is an ineffective way of doing business due to the fact most of the roofing job requests happen during a two-week span at two specific times of the year. The current process slows down how quickly the turn around time is therefore cutting into the number of clients they can accept, business profits, etc.

The students at the ACE Project Space built a web-application to present a solution to this challenge. The solution is “RoofBundle”, an application where the roofers can compile the data of the roof they have gathered into a form and sketch the roof digitally. Once the roofer has completed that step then the application should build an estimate of the cost of building/repairing the roof, a work order of job, and a purchase order of the materials necessary to complete the job.

The students built a comprehensive content management system, and delivered a minimal viable product on this job: a website where the roofer can login; fill out all the necessary forms for the complied roof data they have; and generate an estimate. Read More →

Logged-In Landing Page for PostEd

The ACE Project Space students developed PostEd, a web application conceptualized by post-secondary students for post-secondary students.

PostEd, formerly Connexus, is an idea that started from four university students: David Teffaine, Brett Swope, Sam Cohen and Carson Milberg. The purpose of the web application is to show nearby free and paid events on a user calendar within the app. Users will be able to show interest in a variety of events.

This tools allows users to post events, subscribe to events, and plan their social calendar around their post-secondary institution.

In the second phase of their project they plan to provide all the information they’d need to assist students to find the right scholarship the app filters students’ selections (GPA, faculty, etc.) and customizes the results for the them. Read More →

Speak Easy is a student-sponsored project that ran this past Industry Project term. It is a social networking system designed to disrupt the election industry. Disruptive technologies are those that create a virtual market place by providing better communications between buyers and sellers within the industry. Elections are market places where voters shop for a candidates. Technology can be used to find efficiencies in the election industry just as they would any market place where a free market transaction is occurring. Read More →

The project term is nearing it’s final weeks and our students have been working hard on a number of projects. Stay tuned in the new year to find out more about these projects:

• Roof Bundle
• Eclectic Software Travel App
• e-Care Smart
• PostEd
• Democracy App
• Building Information Modelling

Partners Terry Davison and Angelo Palleta started the company in November 2016 after a year of planning and license negotiations with the MLCC. Angelo owns the Holiday Inn Express on Ellice Avenue, in Winnipeg, and Terry owns Global Office Software. Currently, Hops has five locations and is growing rapidly. As being first to market was critical, the technology for Hops Pizza was developed quickly. The trade-off was that with many areas of their application required improvement.

The students added a Google Geo-Location system that works with order placement. Upon placing an order, the website can dynamically select the kitchen closest to the customer’s location, instead of the user manually selecting their area in the city. They also added functionality to allow users to buy and use gift cards, using Stripe payment integration. Sign in and sign up functionality was added, so customers do not have to enter their information for every transaction.

Technologies used: WordPress, PHP, Javascript, Google, Stripe

For entrepreneurs, time schedules and full time jobs become major hurdles. Fear of loss discourages small startups.

GigOrDo will helps to connect employers and contractors for small to medium sized jobs. This eliminates the hassle of finding help for small day-to-day jobs that don’t require full time employees.

GigOrDo is a simple and secure web application that handles the process of looking for work and connecting employers and contractors. Designed with a Mobile First attitude, the application is easy and effective at job searching. Features include: real-time messaging; secure online payments; and a rating-review system.

Gigs can be applied for or bid on if the price being offered is not satisfactory. A built-in messaging system facilitates communication between users to discuss details of a job.

Technologies used: Digital Ocean, Stripe, mailgun

Over recent months, two of our students have continued work on the web application project for the Manitoba Association of Food Banks. Each student worked on a respective project, as follows.

One of the student projects was an investigative analysis of options for small scale computers that could be used at participating food bank locations.

While the other student worked on fixing and cleaning up the web application, making it launch ready.

This web application is presently in use at the Selkirk Food Bank and anticipated for use at more rural food banks in the future.

For the first phase of this project, please read more at this link: Manitoba Association of Food Banks

CanU is a local organization that organizes camps and workshops for students from grades 5 to 10. They had a need for an attendance application and automation of some tasks.

The project sponsors wanted staff to be able to assign students to teams and buses. Along with this, they wanted better organization and reporting features, where users can query who is on what team and what bus at all times.

The students created a complete and customized salesforce experience for CanU to use. It is anticipated that this will reduce downtime and increase accuracy of attendance tracking.

Technologies used: SalesForce, Zapier, Google

A project for Sustainable Development, of the Province of Manitoba, Indigenous Place Names maps to geographical locations. The work going into the Indigenous Place Names database is very much groundwork focused with an ultimate goal for the province to interface with elders in recording place names.

On the outset of this project, the client’s database and application existed as a FoxPro application. As a legacy application, it was incapable of supporting new features and frequently presented unexpected errors when using it.

Developing largely in Visual Studio 2015 supported by a SQL Server 2014 database, the students wrote an improved application to replace it’s legacy predecessor. The students created new user interface, migrated the old database to SQL Server, and restructured tables. Additionally, working with technologies accepted by the province, the students worked with ESRI to develop a new map with precise coordinates. Unexpected errors are now fixed and handled and new features can be implemented.

Technologies used: ESRI, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server