They say the 3rd time’s the charm – and it looks like that’s just about right for the Philadelphia StartupWeekend. While some weekends end with a bunch of mock-ups, slide decks and just a handful of working demos, that wasn’t the case for Philly this time around. Demos and deployed sites were the rule, with almost 20 different pitches making it to Sunday afternoon.
SXSW Interactive is probably best known now for its size. The event is spread through about half a dozen venues around downtown and greater Austin, Texas. And the parties that happen late into the night can be many Texas-sized blocks apart. It was a perfect place to track the activity–and inactivity–of a bunch of techies. Storing real-world data and making it accessible in the cloud is a growing trend, with a number of devices and APIs to facilitate it. Much of the focus so far has been on health, as it was at SXSW.
Our Mashery Developer Outreach team co-organized and participated in over 50 hackathon events in 2011. Not yet 3 months in to 2012, we’re already up to 25 and counting. All this exposure to hack events over the last 2 years has given us a lot of insight into what makes for a great hackathon. This insight also helps us – and our Enterprise/Fortune 500 customers — avoid the non-awesome ones.
American Express found another way to convert social media to cardholder transactions at the SXSW conference using the still-private Smart Offer API. Amex’s “Sync. Tweet. Save.” social marketing promotion positions the credit card for the social media generation beyond membership points.
The Cloud Security Alliance Summit brought together a panel of security experts on February 27 in San Francisco to examine the threats posed by API and cloud-based computing. But rather than providing guidance on how to mitigate security risks they focused instead on the uncertain nature of security in an environment that is increasingly dominated by applications that use APIs to transfer data across the cloud.
Somewhere in Austin, someone is likely already organizing the lanyards for the thousands of SXSW badges for the techies next month. And somewhere in Brighton, the small team behind Lanyrd is likely working hard to make sure its social conference directory is ready for SXSW and all the other conferences that overlap their way through June and beyond. And for any developers wanting to build on top of Lanyrd, you’re wondering about the Lanyrd API. It’s late. And coming soon. Maybe.
Developers living in and around Copenhagen, mark your calendars. The GOTO Copenhagen conference is now in its second year running after a successful event in 2011. The Conference brings together developers, leads, managers and architects for three days of technical sessions across various tracks like languages, front-end development, architecture and many more. The conference is followed by a two day Training program on various topics that you can register to attend, too.
The CleanWeb Hackathon wrapped up this weekend in New York City, with the goal of building apps that explore sustainable business models leveraging the mobile and social web, challenging developers on what they can do in 24 hours with utility, transport and smart grid datasets, and APIs.
College hackathons have proliferated on the northeast over the past two years, from HackNY to Startup Weekend Princeton, to PennApps, which the Dining Philosophers hold at the University of Pennsylvania on a weekend early in each semester.
This year theme was simplicity; taking a complicated app and making it easier. Of the 42 demos presented Sunday afternoon (livestream archive here), here are some of the coolest hacks that took full advantage of available APIs.
On a cool morning a group of hackers slowly filter into a downtown Philadelphia storefront. The whiteboard wall quickly fills up, as a few work on finding an accurate way to track the progress of a single chosen bus line. With phone in hand, others build systems providing schedules and stops via SMS and voice. A few keystrokes and another starts tracking the positions of trains, while across the the room, transportation information flickers across a screen, controlled simply by a pair of hands moving through the air.
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