Tag Archives: developer

Take a peek into a hackathon assembled on the fly.

By Marissa Louie, July 2

What happens when someone come up with a half baked idea that could -potentially- change up the commerce game, then decides to act upon it?

We are about to find out because in the past few hours we’ve assembled a team including up to 8 developers, 1 designer, and myself on the fly to hack it out and see if it will work:

• William Nelson
• Craig Benson
• Sugam Pandey
• Steve Enzer
• Lucija Kordic
• Ari Greenberg
• Joanne Sun
• Michael Arace
• Suyash Joshi
• Marissa Louie

We even have a sponsor who called with a generous offer:

Special thanks to appbackr, The New Way to Finance Your Apps.

The premise: I came up with an idea for a new platform about a day ago. Then we announced the hackathon on a whim.

The plan: Spend up to 48 hours developing an iPhone app while challenging ourselves to produce something of value to society.

This weekend should be a blast. Perhaps more fun than the trip to Belize, surfing, and golfing outings I cancelled in order to build this!

About the Author:

Marissa is a contributor to Adotas, BusinessWeek, and Huffington Post. Follow her on Twitter: @malouie

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of HeroEx, San Francisco’s affordable 1 hour delivery service, where customers buy items then have them delivered in 1 hour or less.

Contact her at (510) 375-1941, or email marissa@heroex.com.

In typical Twitter behavior, announcements regarding future plans for the company were broad and without much detail, regarding the upcoming feature roll outs. Nevertheless, news today of Twitter’s roadmap clues us in to the areas in which the company seeks growth. And it’s all about location, location, location.

While we already knew of Twitter’s plans for enhancing its services based on location and integration options revolving around geo-specific data, today’s announcement does offer a little bit more insight as to what that means for users and developers. We’ll soon see locations, user streams and annotations as integral parts of Twitter’s services, widening the ways in which Twitter data can be utilized.

Twitter will be curating its own database of locations, including hotels and restaurants, in order to offer an array of location–based information to developers. This is part of the @Anywhere project from Twitter, which will add location options to regular Twitter feeds.

For developers, this means Twitter and location-based data can be more readily used for individuals’ purposes, such as automatic tweet imports based on a blogger’s location, among other things. The number of ways in which location-based data can be combined with Twitter-specific actions is countless, and the new options will surely entice developers to extend greater offerings to end users.

That’s a compromise in one way, considering the fact that Twitter’s development of its own location-based services begins to impose on the progress made by third-party developers in the past few years. Several developers have created geo-specific ways in which to integrate tweets, including auto-updates based on one’s location. As mobile use of geodata-sharing increases, it’s in the best interest of Twitter to control more of this space as it pertains to its microblogging service.

Making the new database further accessible to developers, however, retains their interest while also expanding on the ways in which the data can be used for existing third party Twitter apps. One good thing that could come of the improvements is the ability for end users to have more options and control over the way in which geo-location data is being associated and used with their existing and future activity.

Combined with the additional Twitter initiativesfor vastly and expeditiously growing its ownership in the mobile app space, and the recent roll out of Promoted Tweets for generating advertising revenue, and the business picture for Twitter becomes even more clear. We expected to see a number of changes being made to Twitter’s service on an excutive level, and we’ve not been disappointed this year.

by Brian Solis

We all live a mobile lifestyle. Whether it’s to make our life a little easier or streamline our professional workflow, mobile productivity is instrumental to our ability to get things done.

If you had a fantasy application to make your life easier or to solve a unique challenge you face, what would you build?

Well the team at Windows Mobile is partnering with some of the most visible and creative minds on the social web to compete for the creation of the next great app for mobile phones. Each represent a unique demographic to appeal to various users that can benefit from their vision.

Special contributors include Tara Hunt (@missrogue), Erin Kotecki Vest (@queenofspain), Steve Rosenbaum (@magnify), Deb Schultz (@debs), David Armano (@armano), Dave McClure (@davemcclure), Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), Charlene Li (@charleneli), and Hugh Macleod (@gapingvoid).

At SXSW in the Windows Mobile & TechSet Blog Lounge, my lovely and brilliant partner Stephanie Agresta, will interview our special guests to let them vividly paint a picture that explains their applications and how they can help you  All you need to do is watch their videos and vote for your favorite app. The solution with the most votes will become a reality. Make sure you are following @wmdev to learn more!

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

by Brian Solis

Explore the future of the Web with fellow developers and designers at MIX09, March 18 – 20, 2009 at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

There are two ways to go:

One, click here to save $300 if you register by 2/27.

The second, you could win a COMPLIMENTARY pass by sending a tweet to @briansolis right now that explains in 140 characters what you hope to accomplish or learn at #Mix09 – make sure to include the hashtag. Update: All passes have been awarded. If you are a notified winner, you must register for the event by Monday.

Now in its fourth year, MIX is a unique technology conference that connects Web professionals with industry leaders to explore the future of the Web together. If you’re a designer or developer who builds on the Web, MIX09 is the place to learn about products and technologies that help you plan for the future while addressing today’s economic challenges.

* Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie are keynoting. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from these industry luminaries on their vision for the standards-based web, next generation media, rich internet applications and the collaboration between designers and developers.

* Get real answers from the experts. MIX speakers come with top consumer website and top web agency credentials. They represent a variety of disciplines including web design, web development, marketing and business management.

* Tap into the trends and innovations of the next web. Not only will you learn about the future of technologies like Silverlight™, Internet Explorer®, Expression®, ASP.NET, Windows® 7, and Windows® Azure, you’ll also get a deep dive on topics like design, user experience, web standards, data visualization, workflow, product integration and cross-platform interoperability.

* Network with others from the web community. You’ll network with attendees from recognized companies like frog design, Yahoo!, MySpace, Baidu, ESPN.com, Adobe, Digg, Facebook, schematic, Netflix, Fidelity, NASA, Amazon.com, and many, many more. MIX is a perfect opportunity to share best practices with the people that understand your business challenges first hand.

* Be inspired. Broaden your horizons beyond the day-to-day operational concerns and consider the larger questions that drive your business: technology, architecture, workflow and scale.

For those of you going to #SXSW, make sure to RSVP for the Microsoft Windows Mobile and @Techset party and Blog Lounge.

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by Brian Solis

Girls in Tech presents its first ever, “Developer Forum” at hi5 in San Francisco on November 19th from 1:00pm – 5:00pm, followed by a cocktail party.

The event is co-produced by GIT, hi5, Intel, RealTimeMatrix, Slide, MySpace, GLAM, RockYou, Mochi Media, Photobucket, ThoughtWorks, Watercooler and iLike. This will be a casual, yet interactive engagement of developers, designers and engineers throughout the Silicon Valley and beyond. The afternoon event will highlight hot and relevant topics in the development and engineering space such as unique languages – Ruby, PHP, Perl, Java, Python, OpenSocial, new application trends, monetization of applications and platforms, and design and build options.

Please RSVP by emailing Adriana.

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