I’m the proud owner of an iPhone (1st generation; anxiously waiting for the 3rd gen. release later this year). With all its bells and whistles and intuitive easy-to-use interface, the iPhone can also be used as an effective educational tool. The upcoming hardware and software updates promise to make it even better.
Stanford University has a computer science course entitled “iPhone Application Programming” and, guess what, they’ve made it publicly available (free of charge) from iTunesU. That includes everything: slides, homework assignments and video recordings of the lectures! It doesn’t get any better than this.
This brings me to the reason for this post: why not have an OR-related iPhone App? The possibilities are endless: from teaching the Simplex graphical method, to using the location-aware services and maps to help people navigate and meet during our gigantic INFORMS annual meetings. Incidentally, this ties in with Mike Trick’s last post on social networking technologies. I already have an App idea of my own but, for the time being, it will have to remain a secret.
The main question now becomes: what percentage of INFORMS members own an iPhone?
O.R. by the Beach 
There are some genetic algorithms that run on phones: http://pyevolve.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?p=350
Cool! One of the comments on that post points to a GA on the iPhone as well.
Very interesting. There has got to be great ideas around the location-aware aspect. Think of the supply chain and transportation possibilities. How about a cool traveling salesman iPhone app?
Very interesting stuff.