Ole Miss students use technology to create app to track local bar information

Published Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 7:14 p.m.

Profile 2024: Ole Miss student uses technology to create app to track local bar information

Written by Alyssa Schnag
senior reporter

There seems to be an app for just about everything these days, and tech-savvy people are taking advantage of that technology to move into the future by making knowledge on a myriad of subjects easily available to everyone on their phones. We are paving the way for

Julian Bourgeois is 18 years old and has already developed two new apps. When he was in high school, he created an app for his Apple Watch that tracked basketball shots. The idea for the new app came to him while he was out in Oxford after arriving at the University of Mississippi as a freshman in August.

“When we got here, we noticed the bar cover height issue right away, but we didn't act right away,” he said. “Then one of my friends' boyfriends, who is an Uber driver, said, 'What if there was a way to track bar coverage?' That got me thinking.”

After conducting extensive research, Bourgeois developed Crowd Cover, a new app that uses crowdsourcing technology to allow users to check a bar's cover charge prices, whether there is a queue to get in, and how crowded the bar is. I decided to do it. It might be a bar.

Crowdsourcing is a technology in which users on an app enter information and the app distributes the information to other users based on collective agreement on that input.

By September, Crowd Cover will be released for iPhone in the App Store, allowing Oxon residents, visitors, and Ole Miss students to learn which bars charge cover fees and the wait times to enter restaurants and bars. Now you can check if it exists.

“It was an instant hit,” Bourgeois said. “In his first month, we had 10,000 downloads.”

Bourgeois grew up in Metairie, Louisiana and attended Haynes Academy. During his school years, he participated in basketball and baseball until he suffered an injury during his sophomore year.

““While in rehab, I became more interested and started exploring programming and took more structured programming classes,” he said. “I used the skills I learned to develop a basketball app for Apple Watch.”

In November, Bourgeois enlisted the help of fellow Ole Miss student Larson Carter. Carter currently holds the title of Chief Technology Officer at Cloud Cover. Mr. Carter and Mr. Bourgeois are both majoring in computer science, with Mr. Carter also pursuing a minor in entrepreneurship.

Carter, a 19-year-old second-year student, is working on a new feature for the app that will allow restaurant-bar owners and managers to include cover charges and other information in their apps.

“We're scaling up our feature set to make it more interactive for our customers,” Carter said. “We're making the app even more powerful.”

A native of Jonesboro, AR, he graduated from Valley View High School. “[My interest]started in technology from an early age, influenced by my father,” Carter said.

I have experience in computer networking and mobile app development, and have specialized in DevOps over time as my skills improve. He started working on the “Official Partner Bar” concept during his freshman year at Ole Miss.

The two are also working on eventually making the app available on Android smartphones as well as iPhones.

“In the future, we have plans to include Android devices in releases,” Carter said. “There are a lot of features that we are trying to stabilize first before adding another device structure to our umbrella.”

The app currently tracks bar information in 11 cities, primarily home to SEC universities, including New Orleans, Auburn, and Starkville.

Bar owners and managers who would like to partner with Crowd Cover and provide information can contact us via email. This app is available for free on the App Store.



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