Category: Tech news

Participating in hackathons is nothing new in certain parts of the world, especially Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon, a small team of people creates something exciting that generates buzz, potentially selling to a larger company.

One developer took on 80 competitors at a hackathon called “TVnext” and won with a solution to save you from reading spoilers on Twitter with an app called Twivo. The developer has nabbed an internship at the company she built the hack on top of — Twitter.

This particular developer’s story took on a life of its own, not just because the app was really cool (I often don’t pay attention to my feed during Saturday Night Live, because all of the people on the other coast ruin it for me), but because Jen Lamere is a female developer who was up against an all-male group of hackers. She was 17 at the time. An attendee discussed the scene with Mother Jones, explaining: “the only other females in attendance, that I saw anyway, were an organizer, two camerawomen, a caterer, three judges, and a participant’s wife.”

The news of Lamere’s summer internship, which looks like it will be with the Crashyltics team specifically, came via Twitter, naturally:

Super excited to intern at @twitter @crashlytics this summer!—
Jen Lamere (@jenniee_l) May 16, 2013

There’s no word on what she’ll be doing, but the experience that she’ll get will be incredibly useful.

Whether you want to take this news as a win for female developers, teenagers or technology as a whole, the story is a great one. At its very core, you have someone who is fascinated enough with tech to take the step and build something without a team, present it publicly at a hackathon and then take it to the next level by pursuing an internship…and that’s inspiring.

While not every hackathon project will lead to some type of fundraising or exit, or even an actual startup, this is a nice lesson to learn that the networking and experience gained at an event like this can go a long way. It’s also nice to see Twitter, a company that is preparing for an eventual IPO, give chances to younger coders. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya told the audience at Disrupt NYC that “everyone should learn how to code,” and this story is a perfect example of that line of thinking.

Imagine if, instead of a spelling bee in junior high, you had entered a hacking competition? How different the world would be.

If subjects like “XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data” get you all worked up, you’ll dig the “Research Publications At Facebook” site, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. Ranging from hardcore engineering to the sociology of social networks, the library puts Facebook’s open-sourced knowledge all in one place.

Now, for a site designed to show how smart Mark Zuckerberg’s crew is, I’m dumbfounded that it only offers each research paper in downloadable PDF. Perhaps it wanted to preserve the sanctity of the information. And by that I mean leave the documents in their eye-straining JSTOR academic journal format. Facebook could improve the little library by offering the abstracts upfront so you know what you’re getting into like research.google.com, and highlighting different articles like research.microsoft.com.

Still, between categories like Data Science, Databases and Machine Learning, there is plenty to read. While Facebook can sometimes be a bit aggressive protecting its social graph from both spammers and competitors, it’s quite generous with its tech advancements. It’s given away green data center schematics and energy-efficient server designs through its Open Compute Project.

As for this archive, a few articles I’m excited to dig into include:

Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed

Social network activity and social well-being

The HipHop compiler for PHP – even though I know it’s not going to be about A Tribe Called Quest.

I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start – six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened rooms. The Shogun aimed a finger at a door and the princess was forced into bondage. You were the Karateka, the hero, your pixelated motion was as fluid as any humans. I marveled at the realism. The whiffed punches sounded like a fist smacking a ham hock. The fight music, the little fanfare of victory, was all I needed for those few hours before school. Karateka was a marvel in an era of cheap gaming. In a world populated by Pac Men, Karateka foretold the future.

Karateka begat Prince of Persia and the creator of both, Jordan Mechner, went on to become one of the greats in the gaming industry. Luckily, he and his clan of programmers haven’t been resting on their laurels. They have just re-released Karateka in its original glory on iOS or Android, allowing us oldsters a brief moment of nostalgia and ensuring the younger generation understands the magic of a game that sparks the imagination.

They’ve also created an updated version of the game but I suspect most of us will want to experience the pixelated splendor of Mechner’s virtual world instead of the modern, cartoony style so popular with mobile gaming recently. Pro tip: watch out for the freaking eagle.

The weekend isn’t upon us just yet, but here’s a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in — the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a bit of luminescent DIY flair.

The process is pretty straightforward — with about $21 in specialized parts like a small sheet of electroluminescent material and a pint-sized power inverter (I suspect there’s a fair chance you’ve got AAA batteries, sewing needles, and glue nestled in a drawer somewhere) you too can have a pair of Converse that light up in the dark. Adafruit’s Becky Stern says that once everything is put together your shoes will stay aglow for about an hour before starting to dim if you’ve opted to use the slightly smaller CR2032-powered inverter, though you can eke out extra juice by playing with smaller EL panel sizes or using an inverter that runs on AAA batteries instead.

If nothing else, it’s a neat little crash course in cobbling together components and the end result is a pair of sneakers that are sure to catch some attention — just make sure not to get them too wet. First-time makers may not be completely comfortable with the concept of lashing together a gadget with an Arduino and some shields, but a lightweight hack for some light-up shoes may be enough to get them ready for more ambitious hacks to come.

As always, there’s nothing to stop you from peeking at the project tutorial and looking for somewhere else to buy your components. After all, when Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried chatted onstage with our own John Biggs at Disrupt NY 2013, she said the company isn’t so much a parts vendor as it is an educational tutorial company “with a gift shop at the end”.

Austin, I wish I knew how to quit you. It’s only been a few months since TC ventured down south to check out SXSW, but it wasn’t enough. We’re returning on May 30 with the legendary TC Meetup + Pitch-off, and tickets are selling out fast so pay attention and get ‘er done.

The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off is an event wherein tech fanboys, entrepreneurs, readers, and even a few chicks can join us for some booze, conversation, and a generally merry time. Plus, entrepreneurs looking to show off their stuff can apply to be in the 60-second pitch-off competition. The startups will have one minute to wow a panel of judges, including TC staffers and local VCs, using only their words. No demos. No PowerPoint presentations. Just pure entrepreneurial energy.

The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off will be held atThe Stage On Sixth promptly at 6pm on May 30, and will come to a close around 10pm. We’ll have plenty of booze, live entertainment in the form of that 60-second pitch-off contest and there will even be some prizes and a fireside chat with a local Austin luminary, Bijoy Goswami.

First place in the pitch-off will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. Second Place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt, and Third Place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt SF. And that’s just the start of it.

Our NY Meetup + Pitch-Off yielded some excellent Disrupt companies. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up Talkz and winner 3DLT both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield.

The only condition is that these products must currently be in  beta. Go ahead and apply here. Hurry up because we’re in the process of selecting companies and will announce the finalists next Wednesday.

Of course, what’s a stage without an audience? And how will the judges know how to feel but if not for the difference between a dead-eyed mass of heads bowed to smartphones and a group of people excitedly tweeting their favorite picks and pics about the badass event. Cause let’s face it, ya’ll are going to be on your phones the whole time. (So will I.)

This is why you should head on over here and buy tickets. The ticket is only $5 and includes drinks. 21 and older only, please.

We want to see you in Austin and we want you in our pitch-off. Let’s make this happen.

Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

Google and Facebook working together? They’re actually friends, in no small part thanks to Erick Tseng. The former Android leader, now Facebook’s mobile product manager, today launched the official Facebook For Google Glass app. Here he tells me about how a tiny team designed the app around simple photo sharing and Facebook’s strengthening relationship with Google.

Josh Constine, TechCrunch: What was it like getting Facebook involved in the Glass program?

Erick Tseng, mobile product manager for special projects at Facebook: It was great. I used to work at Google [as the lead product manager on Android until 2010]. We’re very close, but I have a personal relationship with a bunch of folks on the Glass team. It came out of a pretty informal chat with folks on that team. We both quickly came to the conclusion that it would be pretty awesome to get Facebook on Google Glass.

It all developed in just a few months. Two engineers built the whole app. There were no formal designers. Just me project-managing it. We got early access to some developer hardware and Google Glass prototypes. We had a very small team build a prototype [of our app]. We liked what we saw, showed it to Google, they liked what they saw, then we productized it. It was fun to work on a new platform like Google Glass.

“Our starting principle was the user experience”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a fast-moving development platform like Google Glass? How do you think about what features to include in Facebook For Glass?

Tseng: From a developer perspective, our starting principle was the user experience. What functionality makes the most sense when you have a device like Glass sitting in front of you? What we came up with was the idea that we wanted to do things very simply and easily. You don’t want a lot of text. We started playing with it and saw photos as a very powerful user interaction with Glass. It’s natural that when you take photos on Glass, you want to share them with the people you care about. We wanted to make the photo uploading process as quick and easy as possible, so we focused on that use case. 

As we were playing with Glass, we were really impressed with voice functionality, so we added in the ability to speak a photo description that gets added to your photo.

TechCrunch: There’s a lot of other functionality you could have added. Did you run into constraints on the Glass platform?

Tseng: To be fair, it wasn’t all that much of a constrained platform, considering we wanted to do photo sharing. Photo-taking on Glass is very fast. It’s just one click to share, and one more to decide who to share with. It’s going to be an evolving platform and we’re excited to see what Google has for developers. My expectation is that over time a lot of the user functionality will get easier. 

“When you have an opportunity like this, you jump in with eyes wide open”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a moving target, where you might not know what the device your app eventually launches on would be able to do?

Tseng: It was fun! When you have an opportunity to jump in on an emerging category like this you jump in with eyes wide open, knowing there will be some dynamics before things start settling in. We went in fully aware that this is very early and still in development, but the opportunity to build on Google Glass was quite thrilling.

We always like to think of massive scale and how we can increase happiness in our users live. With Glass, even though it’s very early, it does feel like the natural evolution of where computing is going. As it evolves from the desktop to phones to computers we wear all over our bodies, it behooves us to start only on any technology like this so we get an early glimpse of what users want.

TechCrunch: There’s no way to read the feed or get notifications on Facebook For Glass right now. Did you consider the balance between building an immersive experience and one that might interrupt and overwhelm people?

Tseng: I think it really comes down to how a device like Glass will continue to evolve in our daily lives and the role it will play. We wanted to keep it simple, but it was a no-brainer that photos are a very enjoyable use case. Starting with that was a very straight-forward decision. We’re excited to see Google’s feedback and get people to tell us what they think, what they wish the device could do in addition to photo uploading and we’ll take that into consideration.

TechCrunch: What’s it like being at Facebook and working with Google? Is there any of the animosity people think there is?

Tseng: We love working with the Google Glass  team. From the very first conversation I had with the team when we said “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to launch was just a couple months. That’s a testament to both teams working very closely together to get this shipped.

More broadly, it’s often forgotten that we have a great relationship. Facebook is one of most popular Android apps today. We already work very closely on that experience as well. And then Home is the latest manifestation of that relationship.

TechCrunch: What about your previous arguments about data portability and who can import whose email contacts or social graph?

Tseng: Data importation? With the Glass team that never came up at all, so I haven’t even thought about that in this context.

TechCrunch: Is wearable computing the future of social networking?

Tseng: No, I think social networking is a broader concept. It permeates everything we do in our lives. Wearable computing is a way of helping you connect more closely and see context about what’s around you, but I think it’s a misnomer to say it represents the future of social networking.

TechCrunch: Are there specific Google Glass features you’d like to see?

Tseng: Oh yeah! I’d like to keep some of those secret for now. We want to surprise folks when they come out. This app is really our first foray into anything like a Glass form factor. We expect to learn a lot.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Paul Davidson, John Borthwick, Douglas Rushkoff, and Steve Gillmor. Recording for today has concluded.

eBay has just updated its mobile app with a whole host of new features and a revamped look. To start, the refreshed UI makes it clear that eBay wants a more heavy-duty offering for its mobile users. You can now enjoy larger photo views, a better system for auctions that are about to end, and the added feature of being able to checkout multiple items at the same time.

But all that’s just fluff when you consider the stand-out feature in the update: eBay now lets you scan your driver’s license from the app for a quick and easy sign-up process. That way, if you’re new to the platform, you don’t have to go through the never-ending clicks of typing out your information into multiple fields.

The feature works by scanning the barcode on your DL to import all the information on it. The feature is only available in some U.S. states for now, but should roll out to other areas in the coming weeks and months.

Along with the iPhone app update, eBay also updated its separate iPad app. Along with multiple item check-out, and some other features from the iPhone update, version 2.3.0 of eBay’s iPad app also bodes well for sellers. You can now attach multiple photos from your library, crop and adjust them, and the process for selecting shipping options is now much easier.

Buyers aren’t left out either. “Search By Best Offer” has now been listed as a new filter in search, along with a way to filter seller feedback by positive, neutral and negative.

Overall, it’s a hefty update with plenty of improvements that should make the entire eBay experience a bit more enjoyable on mobile. If you want to try out the update, make sure to get on iOS 5 and head on over to the App Store.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, “In The Studio.” The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate’s take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don’t have as much context — such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.

As an added bonus, Parth and I have spent a few months collaborating on a post about the enterprise IT stack, written in lay-terms so that a wider audience can learn more about it. We are proud to publish this post today, which you can read here.

Finally, thank you for being a loyal viewer of “In The Studio” as it ends today (my Sunday column, Iterations, will continue). In the span of 18 months, the show ran for 70 consecutive weeks, producing 70 episodes featuring Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming founders, legendary venture capitalists, emergent seed investors, and focused on producing quality, primary-source content in today’s noisy tech media landscape. For me, “In The Studio” was a terrific platform to get to meet people who excelled at what they do. As someone who is new to the technology world, doing the show was a crash-course in learning by conversation, and making those conversations public will hopefully provide insight to others who are looking to learn. I have worked to organize and reproduce all the videos, which you can access here. This is a great privilege, so thanks again to all those who participated.

Google announced a number of new partner apps today on stage at Google I/O during the “Developing for Glass” session. Facebook and Twitter were the highlights of the list, which also included Evernote, Tumblr, Elle and CNN, in addition to the previously announced NYT and Path apps.

CNN

The CNN app sends video to Glass via updates, and streams news to a browsable feed. It can alert users when there’s breaking news in a category that they want to follow, and those alerts can be customized to show up at specific times of day. They show up as text but can also be read aloud using the Mirror API.

Twitter

The Twitter app provides your stream, as well as posting capabilities and the power to snap photos from Glass and post them direct to your stream. On stage, Glass developer evangelist Timothy Jordan emphasized the DM capabilities on Twitter for Glass and how the messages add to a thread that becomes a bundle on Glass. With Twitter, one thing to note is that you have to specify who you receive notifications from (by default it tracks all the users you have mobile notifications enabled for), otherwise you may be greeted with an unending torrent.

Evernote

Evernote on Glass holds true to its note-taking roll, giving users the ability to have their notes shared to Glass from the web or mobile apps. Content is translated to simple text by the Glass service and displayed as simple short paginated messages.

Facebook

Facebook on Glass essentially acts as a new photo sharing tool, giving users a chance to immediately post pics to their FB timeline, and to then add captions and descriptions to those images via voice input once they’re posted. The pics can be deleted immediately if added by accident, and also shared either privately or with friends and the public. Jordan described the simple sharing and annotation features as exemplary of how a Glass experience should work.

Read more about the tiny team of three who built Facebook For Glass and strengthened ties between the social and search giants in our follow up “How An Ex-Googler Built Facebook For Glass”.

Elle

Elle provides snippets in the form of headlines to make it easy to browse through at a glance, and you can also add things to reading lists, or have articles read aloud. For Elle, Jordan said it’s a good way to funnel users to the main website later, and also a means of providing them with info about what articles are proving most interesting to users.

Tumblr

The Tumblr app for Glass allows you to receive updates from your Tumblr dashboard, and you can adjust the frequency with which you receive those. It also lets you post all kinds of content, including text, images and video.

All the apps are available today if you’re lucky enough to be an Explorer or a developer with access to the hardware.

Google held a session today hosted by Timothy Jordan, developer advocate on Project Glass on how to develop for the gadget, and while most of it focused on what developers can do right now with the available documentation and Mirror API which makes use of a tethered phone’s capabilities, Jordan also spoke briefly about Google’s upcoming GDK or Glass Developer Kit, which will be a native development framework for Glass hardware itself.

The GDK will be available at a later date, Jordan said, and didn’t get more specific, but it will allow developers to access a “handful of things” that they can’t currently do with the Mirror API. While the mirror handles 80 to 90 percent of what Google has found users want in a good Glass experience, there are things like offline tasks and access to hardware features like location that require a native API. Hence the GDK.

This will enable “immediate access to hardware” and Glass’s built-in capabilities, so that Glass developers will be able to build things like navigation apps on Glass itself, so you can find your way even if you’re not necessarily connected to the web.

The GDK is in development, and we’ll likely see it before Glass gets its big consumer debut, since it seems like this is a piece of the puzzle that could contribute significantly to the final user experience.

FixYa, a Q&A site where consumers can seek advice from product experts, is launching a new feature today called the FixBoard, which should make the site more useful to big consumer brands.

As the name suggests, the FixBoard is basically a dashboard of FixYa data. It shows, over time, the number of FixYa owners who reported a problem with a company product, the products that have the most reported problems, the most common problems, and how those numbers stack up against the competition.

Rather than just looking at individual questions or individual products, this dashboard provides brands with a much broader view of “what customers are saying,” said CEO Yaniv Bensadon. The data is specifically about activity on FixYa — it doesn’t tell companies about complaints on their own sites or own social media, for example. But Bensadon said FixYa itself has become a big community, with more than 30 million unique visitors per month and 9 million product questions answered total.

He added that even though FixYa has been profitable since 2009, the company is looking for ways beyond its existing ad model for brands to find (and pay for) value on the site. The FixBoard is currently free and available to everyone, but it only covers the top 1,000 brands on FixYa (out of 60,000 total). Eventually, Bensadon said he plans to release a “full-blown” version that companies will have to pay for, covering more brands and offering more detailed data.

I also asked whether any of those potential advertisers/future customers are going to be upset to see the number of customer complaints highlighted in one place and visible to the public.

“We don’t think so — in the same way that no one prevents anyone from going to Twitter and reading the tweets,” Bensadon said. “Now, after several years … brands understand the fact that some users are saying something bad about your brand. It cannot be prevented, and there are two things you can do about it as a brand. You can ignore it, or treat it as an opportunity to engage with your users.”

With the IdeaPad Y500, Lenovo says to hell with the modern laptop diet plan and pumps out a high-performance machine primed for gaming.

With the IdeaPad Y500, Lenovo says to hell with the modern laptop diet plan and pumps out a high-performance machine primed for gaming.

If existing dating websites aren’t working for you (or you’re too busy to try them out), you can get help from paid matchmakers and dating coaches on the just-launched service Wednesday Night.

According to the startup, users connect their Facebook accounts and are then given three recommendations. (You can see a mock-up of a recommendation email below.) If they’re interested in dating one of them, they then pay $50 and are set up with a date on Wednesday night at 8 p.m. (or occasionally Thursday). They’re also connected with a dating coach who can provide advice via email or text.

The website comes from the team of Jared Tame and Teng Siong Ong who are already working on two other dating services — Flock and CupidWithFriends. (They sold their previous startup, Y Combiantor-backed GraffitiGEO, to Loopt.) When Tame emailed me to tell me about Wednesday Night, I asked why the pair decided to launch yet another dating site, and he said:

Wednesday Night is something that really excites us and it appeals to a lot of people we’ve spoken to who are too busy for online dating. Women want to be matchmakers and give guys advice on how to talk to girls, dress, behave, etc; many guys need help and don’t want to do all the back-and-forth messaging and setting up a profile.

Tame’s response touches on one of the issues facing any dating website — managing the balance between guys and girls. That seems like a particular danger given Wednesday Night’s concept, which might attract a lot of socially awkward guys but not as many women. The Wednesday Night website tries to address this, arguing that the service isn’t just for men: “We understand the pain exists for women on dating sites where they’re approached by lots of guys and receive too many messages.” Tame added that matchmakers can also look for dates outside the Wednesday Night network, and if they agree, they automatically become part of the database.

Still, I’m guessing that it will be mostly guys who are actually paying for the service. Does that create a weird dynamic? Well, I’d argue that most dating sites have a slightly skewed dating dynamic, and Tame argued that by paying for the drinks upfront, you avoid “awkward ‘who pays’ or ‘let’s wait while I close my tab’ situations.” (Of course, part of the fee is also going towards Wednesday Night and its matchmakers/coaches.)

As for why the dates take place on Wednesday and Thursday night, Tame said it means they won’t compete with weekend plans. Plus, if it’s a good date you can schedule a follow-up for the weekend, and if it isn’t, the mid-week timing means there’s an easy excuse to end the date fairly quickly.

I also asked whether this is really a scalable tech business, and Tame replied that Wednesday Night has built software that “helps matchmakers quickly profile a user based on their Facebook account, schedule dates, as well as search for potential matches.” He also said that there’s a dashboard that helps matchmakers track their performance — the ones that get more positive reviews get paid a higher commission.

If you’re interested in trying out the site, TechCrunch readers can get a $10 credit by signing up here.