Dom Sagolla | August 1st, 2011 at 17:43 | 0 Comments
I love this iOSDevCamp 2011 Highlights video, produced by our host PayPal, because it features almost everybody.
478 attendees — over 78 contest submissions — with unprecedented sponsorship and co-operation! Thanks for a great time, and congratulations to all who participated. (Special shoutout to those who traveled from Brazil, Japan, and India!)
Christopher Allen | July 18th, 2011 at 14:23 | 2 Comments
We had 78 Hackathon submissions for iOSDevCamp 2011 yesterday, of which we showed 57 in the Hackathon Show.
This is a quick list of last night’s winners:
Sponsored Categories
If you are one of these winners, could you update Christopher Allen (@ChristopherA) with any corrections, what website you wish us to link to, and please remember to put the names of your team on that website.
Thank you to 24k Logos, Apress, eBay, FastMac, Gelaskins, GEAR4, GitHub, Griffin Technology, IK Multimedia, InMobi, iPhone Life Magazine, Manning, O’Reilly Media, PayPal, Push.IO, TapJoy, TheyMakeApps.com, Twilio, Waterfield Designs, and ZAGG for generously donating prizes to the Hackathon contest. We greatly appreciate your support!
Dom Sagolla | July 15th, 2011 at 16:38 | 0 Comments
NOTE: Removed live stream link, as the event is over.
Streaming live video all weekend via Ustream.
See also: Live from Canada.
Oh, and we are spinning music Turntable.FM right now.
Christopher Allen | July 13th, 2011 at 23:13 | 2 Comments
One of the best parts of iOSDevCamp is participating in the Hackathon—you have a huge opportunity to learn and grow your skills, get into the groove and flow of high performance development, and network with future colleagues that may help you solve technical challenges for years to come.
For best results, be prepared. You should know if you plan on joining a team, or if you are going to try to recruit one. If you plan on joining a team, you should be able what skills you have to offer, or what skills you wish to stretch. If you are going to try to recruit a team, you should be able to articulate your ideas well, and know what skills you are looking for. Be sure that you’ve filled out your profile questions on our CrowdVine website as that is how I will help you find the people you are looking for.
And of course you should be flexible—your great idea may not appeal enough to recruit a team this time, but maybe you can join another project where you can learn how to do your own project later. Don’t plan to work alone—the best part of the Hackathon is working with others as passionate as you are about the iPhone and iPad development.
There will also be opportunities for new developers to be mentored on basics of iOS programming. We have a room dedicated to that, and last year some of those new programmers won prizes! If you wish to mentor, or be mentored, contact me.
If you need help forming a team, or finding one to join, I am here to help. I’ll be at the Hackathon desk in the commons area front of Town Hall starting Friday evening and during most of the conference, and I will help you find the people you need.
As the teams emerge and everyone has found a place, I will also be acting as concierge to help you find solutions to problems that you encounter. Need someone who knows spherical trigonometry to make your app work? Let me help you find them.
This year we have over $14,000 worth of sponsored, special and general prizes that will be given out after our Hackathon Show.
The deadline for submitting to Hackathon Show and Contest is 1pm Sunday afternoon. However, your entry doesn’t need to be a complete app—find something undocumented and share it! Show us how you made something work! Create a cool demo of a feature we didn’t know about! Remember, your iPhone or iPad App doesn’t have to be perfect, just be enough that other people can learn from it!
The complete rules for the iOSDevCamp Hackathon are here, but I wanted to highlight a few differences from previous years:
If you have any questions on the rules, contact me at Hackathon desk in front of Town Hall.
In addition to these special categories, there will be a number of other special categories that will be decided by the Hackathon Judges. In past years these have been Best Game, Best Social App, Best Health App, Best Hardware Hack, etc. but final decision will be based on best apps submitted.
Prizes for each of these special categories will a gadget grab bag full of cool stuff, which may include: 12-South Backpack Shelf, 12-South Subwoofer, Apple TV, Apple iPhone 4 32GB Black UNLOCKED, Apple Store Gift Certificates, Apple App Store Gift Certificates, Blue Mikey iPhone/iPad Microphone, Cobra iRadar Detector, E-Merse Dry Waterproof iPhone Case, Griffin Cases, Guide 10 Solar Power Charger, Hasbro Nerf Tag Blaster, iDevices iGrill, iHealth Blood Pressure Dock, iRig Microphone, Lark Sleep Monitor, Logitech Case with Bluetooth Keyboard, Macally Dual AC Charger for iPad, Magellan iPhone Car Kit, R.I.O.T. iPad Stand, RJawbone JamBox Bluetooth Speakers, Schoche iPad Car Chargers, Seagate GoFlex 1.5TB FW800/USB2 HDs, Verbatim Bluetooth Keyboard, Withings Connected Body Scale, XBox 360 Kinect Sensor, etc. Each gadget grab bag is worth $200 to $400.
As always, iOSDevCamp staff will be giving out blue tickets to those exhibiting our values of contribution, sharing, openess and “can do” attitude. If someone you know deserves a ticket, contact me or other staff member.
The person with the most blue tickets after the Hackathon will receive our Iron Man award, and one of our gadget grab bags. In addition, we’ve have quite a few ~$100 items for the top blue ticket holders, as well as many other valuable prizes donated by our sponsors for the remaining blue ticket holders.
Dom Sagolla | May 31st, 2011 at 00:52 | 0 Comments
Every year, we gather the brightest—and often undiscovered—iOS developers in the world. We provide them with a weekend of unlimited bandwidth, space, power, food, and friendship. This is the pattern of success.
Before iOSDevCamp gets started again, July 15-17 at PayPal HQ in San Jose, allow me to inspire you with a few
Tales of Woah.
Meet Jessica Scorpio. She founded Getaround, along with Elliot Kroo and Sam Zaid at our event in 2009. “20,000 lines of code, 2 days, and just 4 hrs of sleep later,” her team won Best Money-making App in our 2009 Hackathon Contest.
Getaround recently won Techcrunch Disrupt NYC. Brilliant work, Jessica!
Meet Alexa Andrzejewski. She wrote to me in 2009 just before iPhoneDevCamp 3, asking if I could help her find a team of developers, and I convinced her to attend. She recruited a team, signed them on the spot, and set about in deep focus to build a functional design. For their efforts and slick demonstration, “Foodspotting Lite” was awarded Best Social iPhone App.
Alexa and Foodspotting are now in their second year, funded to the tune of $3 million. Cheers to Alexa, Ted, and Soraya—may you dine well always.
Meet Joe Hewitt. His entry IUI at the original iPhoneDevCamp in 2007 won the Best Open Source award. That was also the month that Joe’s company Parakey was purchased by Facebook.
The creator of Firefox and Firebug also built the mobile Web version of Facebook AND their iPhone App. He recently left that company to work again in the service of software developers worldwide. We love you, Joe.
Meet Tristan O’Tierney. In 2008, he went full time with Tapulous and helped sponsor iPhoneDevCamp 2. I invited my friend Jack Dorsey to the event, and his one piece of feedback was this: “I was really impressed with that fellow Tristan. He appreciates good design.”
Two months later, Tristan and I (along with eight other volunteers) produced the Official Obama ’08 iPhone App. A few months after that, Tristan was working with Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey to create the first version of Square—as a co-founder.
Meet Mike Lee. The co-founder of Tapulous joined me on stage to kick off the event in 2008. Mike also helped create the Obama ’08 iPhone App, and later built the Apple Store App. Last year, Tapulous was sold for an undisclosed fee to Walt Disney Company.
Mike is now organizing Appsterdam.
Meet Neil Young. The founder and CEO of ng:moco:) accepted the first iFund grant. They announced the ng:moco:) Labs project in our keynote in 2008.
Neil’s company was bought for $400 million by DeNA last year.
Meet Steve Demeter. The creator of Trism attended our first iPhoneDevCamp, and asked me if anyone was working on native code. This was in 2007, before the SDK or the App Store. Steve spent the entire weekend investigating iPhone development, and the subsequent months writing Trism all by himself.
As a result, he was able to ship a kickass game on day one of the App Store. Summer of 2008, at the second iPhoneDevCamp, we encouraged him to go full time with his company Demiforce on game development.
During our third camp in 2009, he was our Keynote Speaker and told the tale of a lifetime of sacrifice until he found our community. We salute Steve, an Apple Developer poster child.
Meet Sudha Jamthe. She was the moderator for my panel at the first-ever Twitter Conference in 2009. As part of Developer Relations at PayPal and to promote their brand-new API services, Sudha sponsored iPadDevCamp in April 2010. She selected iConcessionStand for the Best Use of PayPal API Award.
iConcessionStand went on to win the Grand Prize at the PayPal X Developer Challenge last year. Sudha is now a strategist at PayPal, hosting her third consecutive iOS Developer Camp this summer thus becoming our most generous sponsor of all time.
Meet Raven Zachary. The Founder of iOSDevCamp (previously iPhoneDevCamp), had the idea for this event in 2007 before iPhone even shipped. He reached out via Twitter to find a place to hold the first event and I was lucky enough to be listening at the time. Raven’s positivity and Open Source ethic inspired me and the other founders to band together for an unprecedented collaboration.
A year later, just after our second camp, he directed the creation of the Obama ’08 for iPhone app for the Obama Campaign, recruiting a ten-person team comprised largely of camp alumni. That app remains one of the most successful free apps ever to hit the App Store, and resulted in a personal phone call from Steve Jobs to Raven.
Raven is now President of Small Society, one of the world’s most sought-after iOS user experience and development agencies, and he serves as an advisor to both Urban Airship and Apperian. Small Society just celebrated its second anniversary by donating a large portion of revenue to charity. Bonne chance, Raven! It is an honor to work with you.
Meet Christopher Allen. Our Event Concierge is co-author of the SSL standard. His roots in MacHack inspired our approach to the Hackathon Contest. Since the first event Christopher has published the introductory iOS development book “iPhone in Action,” and produced five card games for iOS including Reiner Knizia’s Money. He currently is founder of Alacrity Software.
Meet Whurley. The CTO of Chaotic Moon collaborated with NewsCorp to create The Daily in record time. This app, the first of its kind and a pioneer with in-app subscriptions, is about to reach one million downloads.
Meet Christopher Messina. His influence as creator of BarCamp inspired our “unconference” format. Since the first event, Chris has remained an Open Source advocate, helping to create OAuth and many other initiatives.
Meet Blake Burris. His company Dynamo Labs was the first recipient of the fbFund, Facebook’s $10 million grant fund.
My name is Dom Sagolla. After helping to create Twitter in 2006, I co-founded iOSDevCamp with these five men in 2007. We produced the event in 21 days, from first tweet to first seat. After joining the alums to build Obama ’08, I founded DollarApp, wrote the book “140 Characters“, and co-founded stealth mode Swagger Inc. in San Francisco. I’m now a professional speaker, and travel around the world to talk about these experiences and help start local communities of support for app makers.
I write to you because now is the best time to go independent and aim for success in the Apple App Store. We’re all here to support you. Join us, July 15-17 at PayPal HQ in San Jose for iOSDevCamp 2011!
iOSDevCamp