The Physical Web project is an experimental project started at Google but an open project for all. They are planning to enable people to walk up to any smart device - a vending machine, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car - and not have to download each and every application, but interact with them with just a tap.
Let's start with the simplest thing. Fumi beacon will direct people to Fumi's blog (here!)
It's super easy.
Step1: Download the Physical Web app from Google Play Store
Step2: Open the app on your Android phone, select "edit URLs"
Step3: Put the beacon under your phone and push the button (there's only 1 button)
Step4: In the text box, enter URL you want to direct the beacon to
And you're done! Fumi's Beacon directs everyone who interacts with my beacon here :)
Honestly, I didn't think it's so easy!
Then, you can of course have some more fun with it.
For example, in this video the toy that has beacon in it broadcasts a URL to a webpage that contains JavaScript to directly connect to the toy via Bluetooth. You can change the LED color, sound, etc. The toy is a standalone device that can be played with by youngsters, while the webpage interaction lets the parent easily configure and personalize the toy.
I saw demos of beacon + parking meter and payment, beacon at restaurant use case (instead of the hardware that you take when you are waiting for the queue at the restaurant, your Android phone will be a replacement), etc.
1776, a startup incubator based in Washington DC is hosting a global startup event called ChallengeCup.
They've toured the regional competitions in Washington DC, Chicago, Moscow, Berlin, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, London, Austin, Denver, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Beijing, New Delhi and San Francsico. SF is the last stop of the tour and was hosted today. The winners from all of the venues will be invited to the global tournament held in Washington DC in May.
The format of this challenge cup is that the local startups apply, 1776 pre-screens them (in case of SF, they had over 100 applications and narrowed to 22) and on the day of the challenge the startups will have 1 minute each to pitch, judges will select 2 nominees from each category (education, energy, health and smart cities) and those nominees will each have 5 minutes to present, judges have 3 minutes to ask questions and finalists are determined.
Education:
Winner: Uclass is a venture-backed, Common-Core-lesson marketplace that aims to disrupt the curriculum industry. On UClass, both teachers and textbook companies sell their vetted resources in bite-sized formats.
Runner up: K-12Nest is a service to ask questions and collaborate
Energy:
Winner: Enact Systems is a home-energy marketplace that allows you to plan money-saving projects, view live bids from local service providers and financiers in an area, schedule appointments with them and more. enACT partners with major utilities and is now available throughout major cities in California, soon to be expanded in other states.
Runner up: Geli is energy storage and microgrids company
Health:
Winner: ReferralMD is a web application that offers a comprehensive, business-management solution designed to track and monetize health care referrals.
Runner up: Stroll is a tool for doctors to give transparency on care options and procedures for their patients
Smart Cities:
Winner: Handup is a direct donation system for homeless people and others in need in a given neighborhood. With HandUp, users can donate to a specific person via their web profile or SMS, learn about their story and needs and hear updates on their progress.
Runner up: ScootNetworks is shared, electric, smartphone-activated motorscooters
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki
Users create an unconfirmed event (like concerts), set the target number of tickets they'd like to sell, and run the event only if the target is reached. The other ways is to presell regular confirmed events by offering perks and discounts on early bird tickets. They defined themselves as "KickStarter for ticket sales".
They also talked about how different the payment environment is- credit card is not norm, and when they started, more than 85% of payment was offline, but now only few people prefer to pay offline. However, people in Middle East still are not willing to use credit card online, so they need to adjust to that. They are thinking of using Bitcoin, and if that happens, they will be first company in Middle East to use Bitcoin ;) They have no competitor, because nobody else in Middle East is selling event tickets online. (Wow!)
Mena360.com from Dubai, UAE
They resell products and contents from non-Arabic countries to Arabic countries, defined themselves as a "gateway for e-commerce in Arab". There are lots of barriers for non-Arab companies to enter the market, including language translation, business custom difference, cultural difference, etc. FedEx's service is not sufficient to run logistics in Arab, financial culture is different, and it is too much work for customers to return products- so Mena360 is a service that resolves all those issues specific to Arab world.
Trochet from Saudi Arabia
Trochet is a word that mixed "trash" and "crochet", the project gathers recycled plastic bags and sends them to women in need to knit or crochet them to produce bean-bags etc. Trochet then sells the products and uses the money to support the women.
Qordoba is a translation service, using human translation and machine translation. They actually have 1,200 certified linguists to translate, in 25 languages. Their clients are government agencies and airlines, basically customers that have enough budget and wants high quality translation. They are also creating E-reader which is cheap and high quality- he said it is less than1mm.
Crowdsway is a service that helps to connect filmmakers to small businesses that wants to get videos created, although they are going to pivot to a service to engage customers.
There is a new concept "Peace for profit". The question is, how good can humans be to each other?
Human trends- urban, dense, coastal, networked. There will be 3-5 billion people living in cities. There will be censors, things will be ubiquitous, social & interpersonal. Measuring, modeling and predicting will be enabled by those data.
In the past, we only had human to human direct interactions, but now how people engage with others have changed. People can publish episodes of stories, and those episodes will be shared without human interactions.
Peace building stack. How can humans be nicer to each other? Past efforts for peace was focused on how to reduce bad things to happen (like conflicts). How can we increase awareness, attention, communication, coordination, cooperation, collaboration and collective intelligence to lead to sustainable peace? There's no perfect solution for peace, but we can improve.
Design Principles for Peace Tech:
Share what doesn't work.
Start with TINY behaviors. Don't start shooting for making big changes when working for peace.
Peace Innovation Design Loop.
"The real threat is behavior, not the person."
Design behavior. Trigger behavior.
Staying in other people's house is scary, especially if you don't know who that person is. But if we think about AirBnB, it changed the game by data, information, and social aspect.
More talk about Behavior Design.
How do we drive people to do something? What is the trigger, motivation, ability to make someone do something?
- It needs to be simple and clear. Usually commitment to repeat is hard, so temporal aspect is important too.
"Core loop"
Understanding what is the sequence for your service.
ex) Angrybirds
Play the game, satisfaction, and repeat.
How do we have users repeat with more complicated service?
ex) Amazon
Search, purchase, pay.
Amazon provides things like recommendation and local deals to make you repeat.
"If you can't measure, you can't impact."
In the past, non-profits were bad at measuring- and the outcomes were merely you "feel good". Measuring is important.
Behavior design for health: Nike
Behavior design for civility: Lyft Rideshare
Car-sharing existed before Lyft, but it was hard! You didn't know who the driver was, if he or she is a nice person, etc. With data, users are much more comfortable doing car sharing, and people's behavior changed, because it will all be visible by data. People try to do good actions, incentivized to be good.
Behavior Design for Community Cohesion: NextDoor
NextDoor is a hyper local network. The speaker lives in Palo Alto, but since she needs to work during the day, she has not had opportunities to know her neighbors, and talk with her neighbors until she used NextDoor. She knows who has small children like her, what they like, and feels more comfortable talking with them when she sees them on the street. "NextDoor enable us to be sociable."
Lastly some comments:
Start by gaining empathy
Reframe the problem
Precisely define behavior
Fisking
Building a fact-checking platform. This participant went to Iraq for military, which he regrets but he lacked information to make conscious decision. So, he started to build an online platform that can take news articles, and crowdsource commenting and fact-checking those articles to point out what is false information, what is biased article, what is propaganda, etc.
Platform to monetize videos
Online platform to tackle weight loss in group
An app to inform the police officer if the person is good or not
Power partners
A platform for users to share their skills, connect and create teams
A service for women to share and sell their food
In some countries in Middle East, women's work is to cook for the family. If we made a service for them to create extra few plates and sell, and contribute to the family income, it will empower women's status. Targeting tourists as well.
Solving the unemployment problem in Tunisia
Unemployment is a huge problem in Tunisia, especially after the revolution, Tunisia is seen as a country that is not safe, so tourists won't come, and 7,000 people lost their jobs.
Disaster Information Platform
During disaster, people needs to localize information, find people, donate money, etc.
Foodies without borders
Create empathy through food photos. foodunites.us
Communication tool for disaster
Service to share knowledge and information for Peeks (Palestine geeks)
A service to combine Groupon and Meetup and make it better
Better function to meetup.com so that participants can communicate within the community. For example, if they went rockclimbing together, they can also get discounts and go to bar together after that.
Something like Coca-Cola "Small World Machines" campaign
This campaign brought people in Pakistan and India together. Also, it is notable that Coca-Cola was not using their philanthropy budget but ad budget, and making this campaign business sense.
Other things to think about- governments can shut down your service. In MiddleEast, we already saw that happen in the past. Force can't fix things!
Some more pictures from hackathon:
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki
What started as a brave experiment four years ago is now a full-fledged part of the HTML5 application platform. WebGL provides real-time, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to anyone with a browser. To create these experiences, all you need is a text editor and a little imagination. WebGL is being used worldwide to create games, virtual environments, page graphics and data visualization, and it now runs on all desktop browsers and nearly all mobile devices. Tony will give a brief, somewhat technical introduction to WebGL, provide a quick survey of what’s hot and what’s hype, and share his thoughts about where this exciting new technology is headed.
Talk #2: Optimizing WebGL Applications with +Don Olmstead
WebGL allows developers to create fully 3D worlds within the context of the browser. However the API itself is very low level, and if used improperly can cause a performance bottleneck within the application. To effectively use the API its necessary to understand both how WebGL works and how an application uses the interface. To illustrate this the optimization of the PlayStation 4 UX, the largest site built completely on top of WebGL, will be discussed.
Did you know that PlayStation 4 UX was built on WebGL? That is totally awesome!
His slides are up here:
Talk #3: WebGL and real-time web communication with Victor Sand
As we have seen, WebGL is a very powerful tool for enriching the Web with graphics, but how do we get it into the hands of the creators? How do we provide the myriad Web developers with powerful and sharpened mechanisms that take away the hassle of specialized and redundant ground work? Victor will highlight some aspects in building years of experience into a smooth pipeline, providing coders and artists alike with a sturdy and powerful web graphics tool. Then, Victorwill demonstrate how WebGL experiences created with Goo Engine can be elevated to the next level by making them even more immersive and engaging. They will show how you can use any smartphone connected to the public Internet to remotely control WebGL applications and games. Last, Victor will demonstrate how this communication pattern can be applied to control Web connected physical objects from continents away.
Talk #4: Finding (and Making) your Happy Place with Isaac Cohen
Inspiring talk!
We as coders are by definition creators, our tools are html5 and our canvas the internet itself. Because of the power of the tools we possess, we are able to ask emotional questions through code. By spending time creating exactly what we want to create, we not only manifest a space that we can go to as an escape, but additionally provide an free oasis for the rest of humanity to explore. In this talk we will look at a few of these digital playgrounds, and additionally actualize a project of our own using WebRTC , the Web Audio API , and Three.js
I tried using a sample app that Devnook created that enables you to send emails with embedded structured data in gmail. Those embedded structured data are used in Google Now too.
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
