This weekend is going to be an action packed Family Guy Themed API Scavenger Hunt!
Thanks to SignalFire‘s creative efforts , you will get to role play as a Family Guy character solving puzzles and winning points through reading documentation and using APIs to help you through your journey. The guys from Pearson Developers explains it best:
Yesterday Firebase launched Firepad, a Firebase-powered open source collaborative text editor. Here’s the product pitch, Michael Lehenbauer says it best:
Firepad provides true collaborative editing, complete with intelligent OT-based merging and conflict resolution. It’s full-featured and has support for both rich text and code editing. Some of its features include cursor position synchronization, undo / redo, text highlighting, user attribution, presence detection, and version checkpointing.
A few weeks ago at SXSW I had the opportunity to meet Ari Fuchs, developer evangelist at Aviary. After a few rounds of birthday drinks (I had just turned 24), I slurred a promise to him that I would play around with Aviary’s API.
SXSW is here again and we are ready!
This year we are giving out TokBox WristBands. They are motion activated and light up with a brilliant flare whenever you shake hands or fist bump someone. Make a visual connection! Here’s how it works:
TokBox WristBands
Ankur Oberoi and Song Zheng will be roaming the city. To get your TokBox wristband simply find us and ask for one!
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:
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.
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.
WebRTC Demo Day! Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of WebRTC. A few weeks ago, Google unleashed Chrome 23 which has WebRTC and PeerConnection support. This is really exciting because everyone on chrome (and IE users with Chrome Frame plugin) can now experience the next generation of communication via live video. Today is the day to experience it. Simply go to https://OpenTokRTC.com and join a room! If you’re lucky, you might catch a few WebRTC Streams from iOS devices.
With all the excitement going on with webRTC and iOS interoperability, I’m sure many are excited to get started. If you don’t have time to navigate through the docs, then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I’m going to show you how to get started! If you didn’t know already, webRTC is a new HTML5 spec for interactive media streaming on the web.
Browser to Browser
This is very simple. All you have to do is go through our getting started tutorial. The basic idea behind OpenTok SDK is a publisher/subscriber model in a session. First you connect to a session, then you publish to a session. As other people publish to a session, you’ll get a streamCreated event, in which you’ll simply subscribe to their video stream. If you open up multiple tabs you’ll be able to see multiple videos. By default, the tutorial uses our flash stack. But we want WebRTC, so all we have to do is change our javascript library:
Update: March 13, 2014 – Please note that this blog post references the archiving functionality in our OpenTok 1.0 platform. This feature is no longer being supported. Learn more about archiving using our OpenTok 2.0 platform.
A few weeks ago, Filepicker.io added new features that allowed users to record video directly from their webcam into their cloud storage using OpenTok’s standalone recorder. What a cool integration! I can now leave video messages for myself everyday.
That very weekend, I attended the box hackathon and met the very cool guys from Filepicker. After speaking with them, I realized that OpenTok’s archiving capabilities integrates snugly with their api, especially with the recent release of our stitching API. And just like that, OpenTok Picker is born.
