Carbon Counter 5000

In deciding on what would make an interesting software project, the first question you have to ask yourself is this, "what do people need?"

Clearly, people love games, but that's been done to hell and back so from a creativity stand point, not an original idea at all. This leads to the next question, "What is an original idea?"

The real problem with answering this question is that if you can think of it, chances are someone has done it. What you really have to do then, is come up with something that may not sound completely origin at a high level but, when viewed more closely, reveals a rich exposure of features that serve novel purposes.

Taking these things into consideration, I came up with something akin to a calorie counter. The difference here is that instead of counting calories, this application allows people to track their carbon emissions. Much like the calorie counter, this application could be used to help people track exactly

how big their carbon footprint is and offer advice on how to adjust it to levels that could help to prevent environmental damage.

In doing research on the originality of my idea, I decided to use summon the Oracle (Google) in order to see if there was anything similar. To my surprise NO ONE has thought of this!!! Just kidding, BP actually has an web-based application that will estimate your carbon footprint. However, they didn't

appear to offer any kind of long term tracking of carbon emissions for users.

After realizing that this kind of functionality wasn't offered I thought, "Wow! that really could be cool actually!" Not only does this application have the potential to be fun to implement, it also allows for a bit of originality in terms of the kinds of feature that could be offered as well as being well within the realm of possibility to implement under the given constraints (time mainly). It also, is designed with helping the environment in mind so not only is it original and interesting, it also has the potential to "change the world", which is very much in the spirit of software engineering as defined by Prof. Ackley.

So without further ado, I present to you, Carbon Counter 5000*. An interactive web based application that allows users to not only track their carbon emissions, but also gives them feed back on ways to improve / minimize their footprint. Users can sign up to have on going carbon tracking as well as anonymous emissions analysis, if a user doesn't want to share information.

* The 5000 in the title doesn't mean anything, I just added it because everything sounds more exciting if you put a big number at the end.