Maine software company offers student app logo contest

A Maine-based global software company, whose founder Dan Smith lives in Dover-Foxcroft, is working to get its products off the ground and take the technology to Silicon Valley. 

Physix:Q2 (quantified quality) is looking to connect human and machine thoughts with emotion represented via the color spectrum, an idea Smith says will have a significant financial impact on Maine.

Smith said the AI company is developing an app to measure the effect of food, activity and medicine on physical and mental health. The app is named UniΦ, pronounced Unify with the word Uni and the Greek letter Phi.

The software is based on Physix, a novel system to record online how words are interpreted differently across language and culture barriers. Colors equal feelings and black and white represent facts. Instead of hearts, emojis or stars, the spectrum is used as the standard scale of personal preference and opinion.

The output can be easily interpreted by both people and machines, and AI is then able to understand philosophical differences.

“We have this app being built but we don’t have a logo for it,” Smith said, saying he would like to engage the creativity of Maine kids to design one.

All Maine students in kindergarten through grade 12 — homeschoolers included — under age 18 are invited to enter the contest (https://physix.world/unilogo/) with the winner earning a $1,000 prize.

The app is all about being healthy and learning life skills regardless of geographical location and the logo will be used globally. Simple shapes are recommended and the logo must be able to be copyrighted.

He said the logo needs to appear on a screen and “if you can email it to me, good enough.”

The winner will be determined with an online statewide vote using the company’s software on the last day of February. 

“It will all be done in public so everybody sees,” Smith said.

Contest inquiries can be sent to art@supramagic.com.

Smith said the UniΦ will allow users to pick a color to indicate how they are feeling. “It’s just a super simple idea that goes everywhere,” he said.

“Your health is a line of color and your healthy days are green or better and the bad days are the other color,” Smith said. “Same thing with your mind,” with problems in the red zone and solutions in the blue zone.

UniΦ will go worldwide, and work in any language and on any device. Smith said users can be anonymous to have the data just for themselves and/or their doctor, or choose to provide the information for a database.

“We have just the very beginning, the framework set up and from here we’re looking to just get bought out,” Smith said, hoping several apps being worked on will be purchased by Big Tech firms. Developers in China, Nigeria and Mexico are under contract.

Other Physix:Q2 apps will help determine online hate speech and misinformation. “What it does is a standardized format for the AI to look over and find out,” and Smith said people can then look at the data and decide for themselves.

“It brings it to a digital level so that AI can analyze speech and talks and see where the problems are,” Smith said.

He said he hopes investment in the apps will bring money into the Maine economy. 

“There’s so much software to be made and I’m building just two or three apps but literally thousands of apps can be built with this,” Smith said. “So let’s bring some of that coding to Maine. We can code for Big Tech here. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, so bring some of the jobs here.”