Dude, Where's My Car?

Amid the mad dash to be the next independent programmer to strike gold with a best-selling iPhone application (as evidenced by the immense popularity of Stanford's iPhone app development course, recently named to the Huffington Post's list of "Coolest College Courses"), Eddie Kim, '05, MS '06, chose a different path. Kim—a proud "PC"—considered making an app for the iPhone but lost interest when he learned he'd have to do it on a Mac. Instead, the 27-year-old former Volkswagen engineer bought a book and taught himself how to code for Google's mobile operating system, Android. Now, his Car Locator app for the Android platform is the No. 6 seller in the travel category of Google's Android Market. At $4 a download, Car Locator earns Kim about $13,000 a month. The app, which guides users back to their parked cars and has a timer to alert them when the meter's about to run out, recently placed third in the travel category in the second Android Developer Challenge.