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PROVO — Due to their love of card games, three BYU students recently developed a new app multiplayer card game for the iPhone and iPad and won $2,500 in the process.
Todd Wilson teamed up with fellow students and co-workers Porter Hoskins and Brendan Kingsford on the project. Wilson said the idea sparked after they had been playing card games with their wives.
"We wanted to build something we could use," Wilson said. "We had been playing a lot of card games recently and we said, 'You know, I think we could make a digital version of this.’ ”
Using technology they discovered after the iOS7 was released, the men created an app that would allow people to play card games on their iPhones as a multiplayer game. The app allows people to pull cards from a virtual deck located on an iPad and then by pairing with each user's phone, individuals are able to draw a card. iOS7 sharing capabilities allow the card to pass from the screen of the iPad to the iPhone screen.
"We discovered the sharing capabilities (of iOS7) during a work project we had over the summer, and we had to find a way to send information directly from one device to the other," Wilson said. "We thought that direct communication was really magical and we had never seen that before. We are geeks at heart."
After the students created "Card Table," they decided to enter it into the BYU Mobile App competition sponsored by the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (CET). They were awarded first place for their entry on Feb. 28 and won a cash prize of $2,500.
"There were a lot of outstanding entries in the competition," Wilson said. "It was an impressive field. We felt like we had a good shot (to win.) We knew that we had provided something interesting in every field for the judging."
The Card Table app already had several thousand downloads when they entered it into the competition, and it has since garnered over 25,000 downloads. Wilson said they initially developed the app with only face cards, but after seeing the success, they will be adding Rook, Uno and Phase 10 cards.
"Card Table is not a card game, but rather every card game," Wilson said. The phrase quickly became their slogan for marketing the app.
Wilson said he and Kingsford will be graduating at the end of April and that Card Table became their capstone project. All three men have jobs lined up with Apple this upcoming summer in Silicon Valley, Calif.
Card Table is currently not available on Android devices.
