Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of being a part of the Mobile + Web developer conference held at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. I spoke on a panel about where development was headed in a world where Web + Mobile are the two predominant platforms. There were four of us total, and we had a great time talking about how each of us lived in, and viewed the future of development in this two platform world. The panel was composed of (beyond myself) John Hammink, a QA engineer from Mozilla, Jonathan Smiley, a partner at Zurb building their own HTML5 framework, and Ted Drake, a senior accessibility engineer from Intuit.
Tag Archives: Events
The fundamentals behind a successful hackathon
PennApps hackathon was the largest college hackathon in the world and it took place this past weekend. It produced some of the best/most entertaining hacks that I’ve seen at any hackathon: Remote controlled battle bots, Automatic Wifi Authentication for facebook friends, enlarging media seamlessly from one to multiple mobile screens, app that messages you if you forget to put required items in your backpack, exploring neighborhoods from the comfort of your couch with augmented reality, just to name a few.
Looking back, I would say that this hackathon was a smashing success, and I’m sure the other sponsors would say the same. From my perspective as a developer evangelist, here’s why PennApps turned out to be a legendary hackathon and what we can learn from it:
A new kind of hackathon
Last weekend we had the pleasure of sponsoring University Hacker Olympics. Unlike your typical hackathons, this one emphasized connecting University students with industry professionals.
Personally, I thought the event was innovative in the field of recruiting. In the traditional interview process, sometimes great candidates were dismissed because their shyness or nervousness inhibited them from performing. 1-1 interviews can be intimidating, we’ve all been there. From the interviewer’s perspective, asking candidates to solve problems does not provide any valuable insight into how pleasant it would be to work with them in a working environment.
Double Robotics presents at LeWeb
Yesterday, the talented folks at Double Robotics rocked the stage at LeWeb in Paris. David Cann, Co-founder and CEO, demoed their telepresence robot, Double. The sleek Double combines Segway-style movement with video presence delivered through an iPad.
Leveraging OpenTok’s iOS SDK on WebRTC, Double enables owners to broadcast their video stream on the robot’s iPad from any location. Not only that, but the operator can stream and control its movements from a smartphone.
Cann demoed the Double’s original inspiration, which was to connect remote workers with their home offices. Calling his CTO back in Sunnyvale, Cann took their Double for a three a.m. spin around the office from Paris. Customers are also finding uses for Double for remote tours of factories, museums, schools, and retail outlets.
AngelHack Los Angeles Winter 2012
Here at TokBox, we’ve been supporting AngelHack since its infancy. This year it’s no different, and this time we sponsored at a city bursting with startup energy, Los Angeles.
The event is hosted at a spacious and comfortable co-working space called Cross Campus, a place to inspire “creative collisions through space design, learning platforms, and extraordinary events.” If you are an entrepreneur you might want to check it out!
The event started off with sponsor pitches and API talks. Singly provides SDK for developers to get their app connected quickly and easily with services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, just to name a few. Gimbal provides a mobile context awareness platform that includes image recognition and geofencing. TokBox provides a video chat API (called OpenTok), and for demo I live coded a web and iOS app that video chatted with each other.