Rise of the Hack

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I didn’t know it could be someone’s job to attend hackathons. I hadn’t heard of a developer evangelist before, so a year ago when I stumbled across an opportunity to become one, I was drawn by its novelty.

The mission was to build a developer community from the bottom up by saturating the hackathon scene, gaining allegiance from the early-adopters, the enthusiasts, the hackers. The kind of people who geek out over a new JavaScript library, smother their MacBook Airs with stickers, and maintain wardrobes consisting primarily of startup t-shirts.

If the goal is to build a business on an API, were hackathons the place to start? I wasn’t sure. The tactic seemed so niche. But hey, if someone wanted to pay me to travel and build weekend hacks, that sounded fun to me.

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StartupBus Creates Interactive Busdaq Game

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Last week herds of entrepreneurs loaded onto buses from the west to the east coast. Destination? SXSW in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of coders, designers, business folks, and rappers, spent 3-4 days cruising the U.S. roadways building unique start-ups along the way.

StartupBus had the unique challenge of needing to find a way to connect the fans at home with the companies being built during the trip. Their solution? Busdaq, an interactive stock market game for StartupBus. Players can buy and trade stock shares in the companies they think will be most successful.

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We’re headin’ to SXSW

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The countdown begins! Only four more days until South By Southwest kicks off, the only event where the past year’s hottest music, film and technology intersect. This year our very own Ian Small, CEO of TokBox, will be participating on a panel at SXSW Interactive. So if you’ll be in Austin for the big event, we’d love for you to catch the session live. All the details are below and we hope to see you there.

Tuesday, March 13

3:30PM – 4:30PM

Social Media & Young Children: Our Kids’ Futures

With Christine Egy Rose (Founder, Scoot & Doodle Inc), Hayes Raffle (Interaction Researcher, Google Inc), Patty Chang (Co-founder, Scoot & Doodle Inc) and Svetlana Gous (Consultant/Educator)

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Startup Riot MAKE in Atlanta

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This past weekend I got to travel down south for a pretty sweet event, Startup Riot MAKE. Startup Riot has been hosting a week-long expo/conference in Atlanta for the last 2 years as well as one in Seattle. This year they decided to add a hackathon into the mix to warm people of for the upcoming week of festivities. The hackathon is called MAKE, and thats exactly what these hackers intended to do. No BS, its time to make something awesome.

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How I built Minute Grams: 3 Minute Tutorial

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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.

Minutegrams is a webapp to send video messages via email.
In this tutorial, let’s build a video recorder with the Tokbox API.

Step 1: Include tokbox javascript file

  • Let’s start with our html document, and add jquery and tokbox javascript library.
  • We need ‘rElement’ div to put our recorder in, and ‘pElement’ div to put player in.
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title></title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
    <script src="http://staging.tokbox.com/v0.91/js/TB.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="rElement"></div>
    <div id="pElement"></div>
</body>
</html>

Step 2: Create a Tokbox recorder Manager object

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LetsListen Amps Up the Social Listening Experience

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Listening to Enrique Iglesias shouldn’t be a solo experience. With so much passion, Enrique’s songs demand that you stare into your friend’s eyes while lip-syncing “Hero”. The plus side of alone time with Enrique? You can test out your suave new dance moves.

Music lovers in the tech community appear to agree that listening to tunes online should be a social experience. And the proof is in the pudding. Over the course of the last year social listening services have popped up to meet that demand. We’d like to give a shout out to one service in particular that is our newest App of the Week.

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Music Hack Day

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Tequila sunrise making robot.

We hosted Music Hack Day (our 2nd time!) at our homey little office last weekend.

We had a blast, and looks like most people did too.

Hacker down.

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Trojan Hack Hackathon

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Congratulations to all the USC Trojan and UCLA Bruin Hackers who participated in the Trojan Hack!

Over the 24 hours from Friday (2/3/12) to Saturday, UCLA and USC students got into groups and hacked away on their ideas. No limits, best idea and implementation wins…

Presentation slides were frowned upon, so everyone had a working demo at the end. The demos were AMAZING!

The first place ($1000) went to HackHackWith.me

In 24 hours, they built a collaborative code editing web app. Now you might think it’s like collabedit, but it’s NOT! You can actually upload project files and libraries, code together, and then run your code!

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Elance Adds Live Video to Remote Work Experience

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The 4-Hour Workweek: the book that sent thousands of office workers running for remote-work freedom back in 2007. Newly cubicle-less folks turned to online services like Elance after going all “office-space” on their 10-year-old desktops. That may or may not be an exaggeration…

But it isn’t all cupcakes and roses for remote workers. Sure they’re not required to put on the monkey suit every morning, but there’s also no proverbial water cooler to hang around with colleagues. Just a few days ago GigaOM posted Self-knowledge: The secret ingredient for successful remote work. GigaOM cited one lonely freelancer who decided they preferred the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life.

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OVEE offers Co-Viewing App with Live Video Communication

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Old school co-viewing: What used to happen every Friday night when my sister and I watched endless hours of T.G.I.F. We’d sit in the same room, watch the latest episode of Full House and talk about how cute Uncle Jesse was. I assure you, it was as awesome as it sounds.

The definition of co-viewing has evolved in recent years as we consume more media content online. It now includes anything from comments on a YouTube video, to live text chat while watching videos in Chill. Recently you could watch an episode of Jersey Shore and throw pickles at Snooki with hundreds/thousands of other fans on MTV. OVEE, our newest App of the Week, is taking co-viewing to the next level by adding live video communication.

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