Bowdoin students are mad about Ocarina, a mobile app that turns their iPhones into an ancient flute. To play simple melodies, users blow into their phone microphone while fingering keys, or buttons, that appear on the touchscreen.
The app is so popular that it’s “becoming a potential Wi-Fi network hog as students share their tunes wirelessly and listen to tunes in real time from players around the world,” according to Computer World, which covered Bowdoin’s exploding Wi-Fi use and the college’s response to it in a recent article. Bowdoin recently invested in a massive upgrade to its system, with help from Cisco.
While other CIOs might look at the rising popularity of video and music streaming as a daily network challenge to stress about, Bowdoin CIO Mitch Davis doesn’t view people’s desire for connectivity as a problem. The Ocarina app “is just a small device, but you can tap into 100,000 people practicing with it all over, and it is sort of changing the way we use the network,” Davis said. “Why shouldn’t we see what the world is doing?”