Tag Archives: Developer

Trojan Hack Hackathon

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Congratulations to all the USC Trojan and UCLA Bruin Hackers who participated in the Trojan Hack!

Over the 24 hours from Friday (2/3/12) to Saturday, UCLA and USC students got into groups and hacked away on their ideas. No limits, best idea and implementation wins…

Presentation slides were frowned upon, so everyone had a working demo at the end. The demos were AMAZING!

The first place ($1000) went to HackHackWith.me

In 24 hours, they built a collaborative code editing web app. Now you might think it’s like collabedit, but it’s NOT! You can actually upload project files and libraries, code together, and then run your code!

Motilo Steps Up the Etailer Game

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Folks love shopping online as evidenced most recently by the fact that almost $32 billion has been spent online this holiday season (and we still have two shopping days left). LuluLemon, Nordstroms and Sur La Table, I accept thank you notes

With so many eCommerce sites available today, etailers have to find innovative ways to stand out from the crowd and offer truly memorable experiences; experiences that will not only motivate the customer to make the move from “add to cart” to “purchase”, but also keep them coming back for more.

TokShow: You can do it, put your back-end into it

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Our goal for the back end of the TokShow application was to make it as simple as possible while supporting a couple thousand people.

The biggest concern for performance was moving a new fan on stage. When that happens, everyone in the TokShow needs to hit the server to get the connection ID of the next fan. We thought the ‘aha’ moment of a fan meeting the artist for the first time would be a major part of the experience, so making the transition smooth and simultaneous for all of the viewers was critical.

To keep things simple, we used PHP and MySQL on the server. There is very little state saved for the application. We basically need to know:

  1. Who is on stage
  2. Who is in the line
  3. Whether the show has started yet
  4. What time the show is scheduled to start.

We had one PHP file to wrap our reads and writes to the server, and that’s about it. For our TokShows we needed only one PHP server, which also hosted the database.

TokShow: Building the HTML client for the OpenTok TokShow application

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Building the TokShow app gave us another great opportunity to test our API in a real-world app. And, sure enough, we discovered some additions for the OpenTok API.

Not all clients using the app and participating in the session have the same audio-video capabilities. Some clients use older versions of Flash Player or hardware that does not support acoustic echo cancellation. The acoustic echo cancellation feature was added in OpenTok v0.91.18 (in June), and it works great. It pretty much eliminates acoustic audio feedback. We wanted to build an app that allowed the administrator to see if a potential participant (fan) had acoustic echo cancellation supported on their machine. However, the OpenTok API did not provide that information … so we added it. And the new API includes other information on the quality of each stream in the session. In addition to acoustic echo cancellation support, the API provides other information about the publisher of a stream, including the upstream bandwidth, whether the microphone and camera are enabled, and whether H.264 video is supported. These enhancements were added in the November 10 release of the OpenTok API (v0.91.35).

TokShow: Building a large scale video communication platform

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There are a number of huge challenges being a platform company, as the product we build has to work under many conditions. One of those major challenges is the issue of scaling a realtime communications platform to support both one-to-one conversations and also 5000+ participant talk shows. Now some people might say “Doesn’t YouTube already let thousands of people view a video?” Yes, but the difference is that YouTube is about consuming and OpenTok is about face-to-face.