Posts Tagged ‘tinkerstorm’

RubyConf 2010

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Tropo is proud to announce that we are now sponsoring RubyConf 2010 in New Orleans on November 11-13!

This is the place to be for Ruby developers!  Jason Goecke, VP of Innovation for Voxeo Labs, and Chris Matthieu, Director of Business Development, will be on-site attending the conference and helping co-host the Open Government Hack-a-thon along with Sunlight Labs!

We will have Voice, SMS, IM, and Twitter communications experts on-hand as well as open government data API experts on-hand and of course hundreds of Ruby web experts on-hand to help you build and launch your next open government app!

We hope to get local government officials and agencies involved in the hack-a-thon so stay tuned for more details!  There will also be free food and plenty of coffee to keep you caffeinated!  Did we mention prizes?!

Stay tuned…

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Posted in Events, Ruby, Tropo | No Comments »

Portland OpenGov Hack-a-thon October 3rd!

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Portland OpenGov Hack-a-thon

Do you live in or near Portland, Oregon?  Do you want to help change the world?  If so, Tropo and GeoLoqi are sponsoring a free 8-hour open government hack-a-thon at NedSpace (Old Town, 117 NW 5th between Couch and Davis) on Sunday, October 3rd, from 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM!

Who should attend?  We are looking for anyone passionate about building web or phone applications to help their local government offices and communities.  This includes idea people, web developers, web designers, and data architects.  Fans are also welcome to cheer on your favorite teams or simply be spectators.

We will be serving breakfast and lunch and plenty of coffee!  Prizes will be awarded to the individuals and teams with the coolest ideas and applications (web, phone, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc.)

City officials will also be in attendance to provide inspiration and judging assistance.  Your application may even be featured in a local government promotion!  So stop by and join us for a full day of socializing, hacking, and innovation.  Let change the world together!

For more details and to register for this free event in advance, click here!

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Posted in Events, Tropo | No Comments »

Tropo is Easy!

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Tropo Tinkerstorm

Amber and Aaron are on the bottom left of this photo.

There is no doubt that this weekend’s 24-hour Open Government Tinkerstorm was a huge success!  A conference room full of passionate open government developers came together along with city leaders like Bill Schrier, Seattle’s CTO, and Robin Friedman, former Seattle Emergency and Disaster Management Director.  Tropo, Socrata, and Amazon AWS sponsored the event and remained on hand to help and guide the event participants to success.  In the end, all of the entries developed and deployed are available as open source and were produced for the benefit of the citizens of Seattle.

Reflecting on the event, I wanted to share an interesting observation that I had during the course of the contest.  The winners of the iPad, Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, were not originally in the contest.  They were hanging out with us at the event working on their totally awesome side project called GeoLoqi.  Halfway through the event, Aaron looks in my direction and says that he is interested in integrating Tropo SMS with GeoLoqi.  Several minutes later his iPhone buzzes with an SMS and he looks at me and Amber and says, “It worked!  GeoLoqi just me an SMS notification triggered by my location!”  This was certainly very exciting for all of us but it the event gets more interesting…

Amber and Aaron left to get some sleep and came back in the morning for breakfast with an idea to enter the contest.  Their idea was ChatterCast, a mashup of Tropo, Socrata’s data.seattle.gov, Instamapper, and GeoLoqi services.  Basically ChatterCast subscribes your phone to real-time 911 call data provided by http://data.seattle.gov.  ChatterCast alerts you based on your location of 911 events happening around you.

This is a great example of how someone with an idea can not only win a contest only after getting started in the final hours but how anyone with an idea can change the world.  Tropo’s ease of use makes it super easy to communicate with telephones via voice and SMS or even IM and Twitter with a couple of lines a code.  There’s no reason not to add telephone support to your existing web applications to make them even more powerful in this mobile and social age we live in today.  So what are you waiting on?  Sign-up for Tropo today and change the world!

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Posted in Events, mashups, Open Source, SMS, Tropo | 2 Comments »

Tropo’s Open Government Tinkerstorm Halfway Point

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Tinkerstorm beginsApproximately 20 passionate programmers participated in Tropo and Socrata‘s open government 24-hour Tinkerstorm (or Hack-a-thon) in conjunction with Chris Pirillo‘s GnomeDex 2010.  We are currently at the half-way point of the competition.  Bill Schrier (Seattle’s CTO) stopped by to check on the status of the projects and provide additional inspiration.  Max Ogden and Reid Beels flew in from Portland, Oregon and Mark Silverberg flew in from Washington, DC just to participate in our Tinkerstorm!

One theme that I picked up on quickly from the Tinkerstorm was the love of Socrata’s data API.  Most of Seattle’s available data can be access through their site at http://data.seattle.gov.  The organizers were able to keep the coffee fresh and provide an awesome dinner and breakfast buffets, and plenty of idea people offering suggestions and feedback throughout the night!

Bill SchrierTim from Amazon Web Services stopped by to provide AWS discount codes to assistance with the deployment.  Even the SmartCups from GnomeDex came handy.  Everyone knows how much programmers love and need caffeine in events like this one!
Aaron and Amber also stopped by from GeoLoqi.  Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data, with features such as Geonotes, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends.
Sunday morning has rolled around and the looming 5PM event deadline is approaching too much quickly.  Willow Bl00 was now joined us to hack on her own project.
Here are a few fun pictures from last night’s event:
@Chewbanca showing off his Google Maps, Flickr, and Socrata mashup!

@Chewbanca showing off his Google Maps, Flickr, and Socrata mashup!

Hans' leg gets repaired!

Hans' leg gets repaired!

@WillowBl00 and @JohnnyDiggz

More news at 5 regarding prizes!

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Posted in applications, mashups, Open Source, Tropo | 1 Comment »

Build an Open Government app at Gnomedex and win prizes

Friday, August 20th, 2010

This weekend a number of the Tropo crew have descended upon Seattle for Gnomedex and Seattle Geek Week. We’re hosting the final geek week event, Gnomedex’s Tinkerstorm: an open government themed hackathon.

A group of developers will descend upon the Edgewater Hotel right next to the Gnomedex venue and build apps to help our fellow citizens. Socrata will be there with a bunch of government APIs and data sets for you to work with and Seattle’s CTO Bill Schrier will be stopping by to talk about open government from the perspective of the government. Amazon’s bringing a stack of AWS credit to help you with a place to host your apps. We’ve got a few people on hand to help you understand Tropo and create some great apps with these platforms.

We’re kicking off at 5pm on Saturday and running 24 hours straight. Dinner on Saturday, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday are being provided, as is plenty of coffee all night long. We’ve even got a cash bar running for a bit each evening. And we’ve got some great wifi provided by Meraki.

Why should you do this? Beyond the challenge of building apps that will improve the lives of all around you, we’re also handing out prizes. Want an iPad, a Flip HD, or a year of Animoto Pro? Sunday afternoon, everyone will present their apps and at 5pm on Sunday, the top apps will get some prizes.

Tropo has a number of customers who are building apps for government applications, so we’re excited to be able to be part of this. Heck, even some of our sample apps are themed around opengov or use government data, like our BART eta checker, weather forecasts, or our traffic alerts.

You don’t have to be attending Gnomedex to come to the hackathon. Go sign up (it’s free) and come by and help out. Not in Seattle but still want to participate? We’ve got an IRC channel (#tinkerstorm on Freenode) and a Google Group.

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Posted in Tropo | No Comments »