I visited MIT Media Lab the other day, and met Mr. Yoshihiro Kawahara. He walked me through his lab, and showed me his new project "Instant Inkjet Circuits".
It is a project to easily make circuit boards using Inkjet Printer.
The first thing he showed me was writing with a pen. Connected tester, and we can see it has electricity flowing. Awesome, that was super easy!
The next thing we can do is use a normal inkjet printer and print circuits. There are a lot of printers that are specifically created to print circuits, but this solution is awesome because you can use existing inkjet printers you already have.
This is how it looks.
This is the ink cartridge.
You can load the cartridge with conductive silver ink like this.
And insert the cartridge and print circuit boards with a normal printer.
I had a chance to join Twiliocon Day1 this year. Sadly, I was only able to go to 1 of the 3 days, but it was really a great experience. I really liked the way their event was really developer focused, friendly, and geeky. Really knows what geeks like. I liked it!
Day 1- Entrance
The first thing you get when you approach the entrance is lots of Twilio employees cheering, hooraying and welcoming you for coming :)
Wifi
The first thing you look for when you arrive at conference venue is wifi and power. (or is that just me...) At Twiliocon, you can't just get your wifi password- you need to use Twilio to get it ;)
Keynote Jeff Lawson- their CEO says there are 1.5 billion calls through Twilio platform, and 96% of American adults have interacted with applications using Twilio, and text messages via Twilio will reach subscribers in 198 countries which is “more countries than the United States recognizes" ;)
Software is redefining communications
The world is increasing changed by software people, where hardware is minimal, and functionality is overtaken by software. Example: cars vs Tesla, former was defined by hardware whereas in the latter softwares can expand the ability. “Tesla is a rolling piece of software.” Similarly with phones vs Android/iPhone. Software is infinitely flexible, and flexibility is competitive advantage. "We serve software people who see the world differently." says Jeff.
Buy vs Build -Softwares gives us the ability to say "yes we can do that". In the past, we would buy things. We can build things now. Build is no longer a dirty word. It's good to build!
Joe McCorkle from RealPage He came to Twiliocon 2012 to shut down their Twilio account, because he thought the company was paying too much bills to Twilio. But now, Realpage uses Twilio to manage aquisitions, leads, rent collections and tracking. Now they have a good problem- they have 500 developers to train, to use Twilio ;) Launched “Request Inspector”, "App Monitor" and "App Monitor Alerts" As Twilio becomes used to build business critical apps, you want confidence in what you do. You cannot manage what you can't see. Therefore, they are launching Request Inspector, which enables deep inspection of every webhook request. App Monitor shows errors, warnings, error analytics, real-time dashboard and drill downs of what’s going on in your account. App monitor Alerts can watch your app for specific errors and fire a webhook if they occur more than N per timeframe.
Use case: Call centers
What you bought today is based on technology 15 years old and not flexible. Facebook generation call center agents are not amused by 15 year old "enterprise" software. So Twilio enabled call centers have everything in the browser - right down to full call centers running on a ChromeBox.
Launched "Twilio SIP", "Concatenated SMS" and "Picture messaging MMS", and CEO Livecoding!
Twilio SIP announced, full communication between Twilio and any infrastructure, outbound and inbound. "There's so much you can do in the cloud with software. SIP is the key to bridging these two worlds." Concatenated SMS enables 1600 character SMS. New SMS pricing is $0.0075 each (3/4 of a penny) in the US.
"A picture is worth one thousand words. We are visual creatures. Therefore, we are introducing Twilio Picture Messaging with MMS." And to show that the integration is easy, he already made an app, goes on livecoding on stage in front of 2,000 programmers audience. Nice! “It’s CEO code, don’t judge me” :D What was the app about? They made a nice swag T-shirt, and he wants to make sure nobody takes more than 1 of this limited edition T-shirt, so he wrote an app to control distribution. Pricing is 2 cents to send, and 1 cent to receive.
Live demo of Home Depot, Eloqua and Salesforce
I especially liked the conversation with Salesforce:
Jeff "How long did it take to integrate?"
Salesforce "1 hour to integrate... actually 20 minute of coding. We're in the cloud. You're in the cloud. As long as we have APIs, there's nothing we can't do." You can see the summary of announcements on this post:TwilioCon 2013: Announcing Picture Messaging, Price Drop, Business Critical Apps and More Someone tweeted "Twiliocon is show not tell", and I agree! Twiliocon is also about "doers" and they had the word "doer" all over the venue. Information desk was actually called "Doer bar". And while we were listening to keynote, audience was already reading documents about the new APIs and started to make apps, launching and tweeting while the conference continues. I liked that energy!!
Speaking of swags, their swags were geeky too- they had many things in the swag bag, but among them they had portable power strips with 4 ports (yes, we need power and wifi. It's like oxygen and water...) and cable organizer. Very useful.
At the center of the venue, there was a huge bars up above, and you can text "GLOW" to control it.
If you've been to the new Exploratorium, you've probably seen this Twilio-powered installation "TEXT FISH"- in fact I saw this in the museum a while ago. If you text "fish", you can fish- and you need to fish 3 fishes a day to keep alive, but not to over-fish so that you don't kill the ecosystem.
"SPIN" is an installation that visualizes Twilio's messages on a map, to show from where to where the calls are made, and you can move the globe using Leap Motion.
There were the "MOTEs" all over the venue, in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform team and the Data Sensing Lab. These motes collect various data of the venue including temperature, humidity, pressure, light, air quality, motion, and audio noise levels so that they can visualize those data later on.
Developer Demo Booths and Sponsor Booths
My friend and colleague +Kim Cameron explaining about the mote.
You can play with Leap Motion at the booth.
But that's not really developer friendly, is it. It's like user friendly. If you are a developer, you want to install it in your computer, run it, hack it, and make apps for it. So at Twiliocon, you get to do that. Of course I tried!
We didn't have time to code an app, but we saw livecoding instead ;)
Keynotes and sessions
I liked the way they set up the sessions too. It wasn't just about Twilio's products. From keynote to sessions to booths etc... they had a consistent message how softwares can change the world for the better, and since Twiliocon is all about software developers, people in this audience can change the world.
Day 1 Keynote by Jeff Pulver, a founder of the VoIP standard and Vonage talking about his life experiences. "Listen, Connect, Share, and Engage. Live your passion - you don't need a business model. Allow yourself to believe."
Dr. Mae Jemison the astronaut gave a keynote about 100 Year Starship project - accelerator for interstellar missions. "We have to re-evaluate what we think we know. We believe making an extraordinary future is the best way to improve the present."
Software developers changing how governments work, how houses work, how businesses work, how communications work.... following is an example of how houses and offices can be modified using softwares.
I couldn't join Day2 since I needed to go to the office, but was happy to watch some of their livestream- listening to hear Twilio is launching Twilio.org, to enable nonprofits access to communications technologies that help make a greater impact on the world.
Polaris Project to make a world without slavery and human trafficking,
Tim O'reilly keynote about Code for America:
1. Apps of the future do less (design = choice)
2. Maker culture comes to dominate, so platforming matters.
3. Software above the level of a single device
4. Harness network effects in data, rethink workflows and experiences
5. Rethink workflows "We need to rethink the way world should work, instead of optimizing the way the world does work."
closing the loop: what people are doing and what they actually want an app to do. "Create more value than you capture. Build something that matters."
"Idealism is great marketing" "Let's think about how, in everything we do, we're weaving a better world. All companies should have positive impact & every individual is obliged to work on improvement of our society."
Mitch Kapor's keynote about his experience, in the early 1980s built Lotus culture to have care and concern for the welfare of others, culture of inclusion. Follow your heart as well as your business interests, and try to be a force for good in the world. "The world that I want to live in is one in which good corporate citizenship is the universal norm."
Mitch asks entrepreneurs
1- Are you making the world a better place? How? What are your metrics?
2- Are you leveling the playing field or exacerbating the gaps?
3- Does your team and company culture reflect the market you're serving?
#twiliocon#day2keynote 3 more inspiring keynotes today I bet all attendees are asking themselves "what have I done 2create social value?"
— Angeline Tan (@agilemeister) September 19, 2013
Closing keynote:
Ethan Kurzweil: "There is a Developer Renaissance going on. Developers are the cool kids now. Developers are building world changing products."
Josh Stein, DFJ: "Development has moved from being a cost center to being a revenue generator. If you are not serving your customers well, someone else will. The Internet of things is driving the API economy that we're seeing. Software people are revolutionizing the world."
I had to miss Day 0, since I was working in the office, but I was able to visit the venue a bit in the evening, to pick up the badges and see the atmosphere of the workshops, catch up with my colleagues at Google Developers Cloud booth, and meet many developers in the hallway.
Twilio Quest
It looks like they called the workshop a "Twilio Quest"and it includes gamification aspect- similar to codelabs, you are to tackle the same programs, but there is no materials so you need to figure out how to solve. Based on what programming language you use, you sit in the "guild" seats- though you are not really in a guild in a sense of MMORPGs ;)
They had JavaScript Guild, Python Guild, PHP Guild, Java Guild and Ruby Guild, .NET Guild.
Tweets
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki
I joined Hacker Olympics during Twiliocon 2013. In fact, I went to watch and take photos and report about it, but the staffs told me I must join and it's fun, so joined as participant ;)
Hacker Olympics is a new, interactive spin on the basic hackathon. Hackers participate in a tournament, where diverse knowledge and skills help them to conquer a wide range of challenges. Accumulate points in a race to Hacker Olympics supremacy.
The challenges list can be seen here, but a shorter summary version below. So it's a mixture of software programming, hardware programming, trying out new services, having fun with games, etc.
-BOMBS AWAY!
10-minute Bomberman tournament on wii
-STARTUP CHARADES
Charades is a game of pantomimes: you have to "act out" a phrase (in this case, a startup company name) without speaking, while the other members of your team try to guess what the phrase is. The objective is for your team to guess the phrase as quickly as possible.
-STACK OVERFLOW
Each team gets 100 Cups. The objective is to stack cups as high as possible using only each other and the cups to create a structure that will stand tallest.
-WORLD BENDING - LEAP MOTION
Game using Leap Motion. You're an alien race attempting to save Earth from destruction. You must race your spaceship across the world hitting all checkpoints, in sequence to diffuse the RedMatter explosives as fast as you can before detonation. Bend the world to your will to shrink the distance between you and the next checkpoint.
-ASCII OLYMPICS - SENDGRID
Build an application that can receive incoming emails with image attachments to {address}@{your team name}.asciiolympics.co using the SendGrid Parse API. Your application should respond with an ASCII representation of the image.
-CATCH ME IF YOU CAN - GOOGLE
You're Edward Snowden on the run. Plan your escape plan starting from Honolulu International Airport (HNL). Luckily, you have the power of BigQuery and a flights dataset at your disposal. So what's your plan? Avoid being on the ground as long as possible? Travel the longest distances? Travel to countries with no extradition agreements? Deploy your application to App Engine. It should be able to calculate 3 potential escape routes with at least 4 destinations each. Use the BigQuery dataset "airline_ontime_data.flights" in the dataset "bigquery-samples" for this challenge.
-ESCHER’S LOGIN - PLANTRONICS
Build a user authentication system that utilizes no form fields or input fields. Your system must not accept a username or password from the user. Be creative and come up with a unique authentication system using alternative verification methods (ex. Voice verification, key-press detection, bluetooth , etc.)
-HACKER RELAY RACE - ATLASSIAN
Create a new Atlassian Bitbucket git repo. Give each of your team members access to it. One of your team members should create the first portion of an application that utilizes the Hacker Olympics leaderboard.json API. Each of your team members must then create their own branch of the application on Bitbucket and merge their code via a Pull Request.
-PHONE NUMBER DISCUS - WHITEPAGES
Go to http://thehackerolympics.com/phonenumbers.html to find a comma-delimited list of phone numbers, Use the WhitePages Phone Number Lookup API to find the correlation between all of these numbers. There may be multiple correct answers to this challenge! You will need to use your powers of observation (not just your elite hacker skills) to solve this one.
API Key: 6f4e7b7245c1edc46efa00f1d5000f6c
-RETRO SMS - TWILIO
Check out an Arduino Uno and a USB cable from the registration desk. Use the Twilio API and your Arduino in order to build a system that receives incoming SMS messages and blinks them out in Morse code on your Arduino using the built-in LED.
-RUBE GOLDBERG CHALLENGE - PARSE
Build a code-powered Rube Goldberg chain reaction machine that begins and ends with a Parse API. The data must stay intact throughout the chain! You must transfer the following JSON object through the entire chain intact: {'data':'TwilioCon', 'foo': {'bar':'baz'}}
Example: Enter data in a web form which POSTs to Parse. Parse fires off an SMS with the user’s input which is received by another Twilio phone number, and is then sent via e-mail to an address that is based on Sendgrid, which then sends the data back to Parse to be stored in a database. Be as creative as possible!
-SONGS AS CODE
Go to http://thehackerolympics.com/songsascode.html – here you will find a list of code snippets that each represent a song. Guess what song each snippet represents and write down your answers. Call over a judge to verify them and submit your score!
-THE ANTI-OPTIMIZER - AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Set up an AWS instance. On that instance, write a script in your language of choice that has a runtime of as close to 42 seconds as possible as determined by the `time` command. You may not use any time-based delays or waits to achieve this runtime. You may achieve the runtime through inefficient code, unwise server configurations, or any other creative means.
-THE GIFINATOR - WINDOWS AZURE
We love lists and animated GIFs almost as much as Buzzfeed and tumblr. Craft a web-based animated GIF generator on a Windows Azure Web Site, Cloud Service, or VM so that it can be shared with the world.
The Winners
Twilio team congratulating the winning teams!
Tons of awards including Leap Motion, Nexus7 tablet, Google cloud platform credits, Amazon Web Service credit, etc.
The Team!
This is my teammates, our team couldn't win, but we had a great time!
This event was part of the 203 TEDxCity 2.0 events, which is a TED event for urban innovators, organizers, stewards and builders.
We had live speakers in the venue as well as viewed livestream from TEDx City 2.0 in New York, and did a workshop to discuss what we can do for the future of San Jose.
Livestream
We only watched several of the livestream sessions, but here I will list them all and embed all the videos so that you can watch :)
TEDx City 2.0 Session 1: Redefining Citizen
Poverty professor Ananya Roy, exploring the ingenuity of the world's most vulnerable
Peace strategist Mohamed Ali tackles terrorism with entrepreneurial verve
Entrepreneur Eric Liu is reinventing citizenship for the 21st century
Harassment avenger Emily May is reclaiming public safety for women and for all
Mayor Kasim Reed, who's shaping the future of one of America's most diverse cities
Pedestrian freestylers Shem Rajoon, Luciano Acuna Jr., and Masi James of Bklyn Beast push the limits of urban movement
TEDx City 2.0 Session 2: Reinventing the Urban Experience
Walkability advocate Jeff Speck, who fights against suburban sprawl and bad urban policy
Aural artist Jason Sweeney, reinventing the urban experience through a crowd-sourced public art project
Civic technologist Catherine Bracy is scaling "Code for America" internationally
Radical professor Dennis Dalton, an Ivy Leaguer with a thing for street philosophers
Urban bard Felice Belle is a poetic voice of and on the city
Some notes from Catherine's talk:
-Hacking is democratic!
-Fix not complain
-You don't necessarily need to code- example of Honolulu Answers and writeathon
-How Honolulu Answers expanded to Oakland Answers at National Day of Civic Hacking
-Example of Mexico City - contract for creating an app to track bills was revealed to be 9.3 million dollar 2 years contract, developers got mad since it shouldn't take such a large budget, but they didn't just complain- they stood up to start a contest to write a better app for it, in 10 days, with award of 9.3k, and there were 173 apps developed, 5 of which were presented to congress, and the contract became vacated.
-Announcing the internationalization of Code for America brigade program, to Japan, Poland and Ireland.
TEDx City 2.0 Session 3: Reimagining the City
Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is putting pedestrians at the forefront of transportation policy in New York City
Visionary architect Chris Downey, who lost his sight and gained new ways of seeing the world
Robin Nagle, an anthropologist in residence at the NYC dept of sanitation, talks trash
Street performers John Pita and Avi Snow of City of the Sun are flamenco/blues/indie rockers
Place maker Toni Griffin, an urban planner working to make cities more just
Housing advocate Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development
Sustainability guru Lance Hosey, who's on a mission to make green design beautiful
TEDx City 2.0 Session 4: Redrawing Geographies
Transportation evangelist Enrique Peñalosa turned Bogota into an international model for pedestrian life
Impact designer Alan Ricks believes the global south has something to teach the global north about beauty
Burkina Faso architect Diébédo Francis Kéré creates elegance using local crafts and materials
Writer Joshunda Sanders, who's remapping the mental urban landscape with memoir
Photographer Iwan Baan captures life in informal communities, including the world's most notorious vertical slum
Lives Speakers
Dr. Jonathan Trent, NASA Ames scientist, founder of Inega abd Biofuel Guru
Dr. Ronesh Sinha, Excellence in Healthcare Award, Silicon Valley Business Journal, and founder of PRANA.
Workshop
The tables were themed as Art, Education, Food, Youth, Health, Housing, Play, Public Space. Water and Living Green - all elements that will dictate the future of our cities.
I was sitting in "Youth and Play team".
Our team focused on the fact that recent children's lives are very "structured"- whether they are going to lessons, etc. So we decided to start a campaign to rediscover fun- "RE: FUN". There are so many places and events that already exist that is full of fun for children. Free museum days. Free zoo days. Create a scavenger-hunt like game to rediscover those fun places, in collaboration with schools. Rediscover parks and places children can play outside, rather than playing video games at home.
All the teams presented their plans.
"Public Space Art" team proposed to tax sports team and use that money to build functional and useful art. (Did you know NFL is not taxed??)
"Housing team" proposed Airbnb to housing, and also open schools to other areas.
"Health team" proposed to crowdsource health- "crowdhealth".
"Water and Green team" proposed a greener transportation.
"Food team" proposed to produce local produced food.
Lunch.
One of the participants brought his electronic bicycle.
Motor in this frame.
Battery in this frame.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki
.jpg)
