The latest app to come out of Rhodes College is Hound Dog, developed by Sam Reid ’16 and his longtime friend Sammy Gonzales-Luna of Princeton University. The inspiration for the app came when Gonzales-Luna noticed a lack of simple but effective apps for finding live music. He and Reid paired up and quickly put together Hound Dog, a text-based application designed to give users detailed and up-to-date information about concerts in Memphis and Nashville, TN. Reid and Gonzales-Luna call Hound Dog “the simplest way to find live music.”
Reid, an economics major, wanted to capitalize on a current trend in in the technology industry by creating an app that uses a more simplistic interface than a typical iOS app. “It’s a trend in tech, a movement away from apps. There are too many apps, so we wanted to move towards a more centralized platform like text or Facebook messenger,” Reid explains. “We built most of it in a week. It was made quickly, but there was a lot of meaning to it.”
Reid designed the website, and the pair chose “Hound Dog” as an identifiably “Memphis,” yet nonexclusively “Elvis Presley,” name tag. They chose a gold emblem with Elvis’ silhouette to invoke the King of Rock ‘n Roll’s signature style.
Reid, the creator of the RhodesHacks competition, wants to see more apps being developed by Rhodes students, who he believes have plenty of great ideas and talent. What is lacking, however, is a culture of competition. “If we want to compete with students from other elite schools, we need to be launching our own products.”
Reid is occupied with much more than Hound Dog; he’s developing software for higher education administration that will facilitate critical and fundamental school operations like course and housing administration and predictive analytics. Next year Reid plans to host RhodesHacks 1: Hack for Memphis, an event similar to this semester’s hackathon. Open to students from institutions all over the country, his goal for RhodesHacks is for participants to work on problems that non-profits face that can be solved technically and then scale the solutions globally.
In the meantime, Reid has high hopes for Hound Dog, and in the coming days he’ll be promoting the app throughout Memphis.
By Kenneth Piper ’17