Texting and driving has been taboo for over a decade since the ownership of mobile phones have continuously increased. According to surveys, over 100,000 car accidents a year are caused by a driver texting. Moreover, a recent AT&T Wireless survey suggests that 75% of teens consider it “common” for friends to text while driving.
Mark Zuckerberg has hired World-renowned 83 year-old architect Frank Gehry to design the new Facebook HQ.
Mark said in a post,” I’m excited to work with Frank Gehry to design our new campus. The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together. It will be the largest open floor plan in the world.”
The AT&T Developer Program and Apigee produced the Mobile App Hackathon in Los Angeles, California. Spearheaded by Alex Donn, the event was designed for both technical and non-technical attendees to build apps over the course of a weekend at Io/La, an incubator/co-work space in the heart of Hollywood. This was a free event boasting prizes for winners of various categories such as cash, gift cards, free month stay at Io/La and many more! Breakfast, lunch and dinner were also provided, as well as snacks and other swag –like t-shirts, posters, markers, water bottles, energy drinks, bags, notebooks, etc.
Yesterday Viddy, the social video sharing site announced the launch of their public API for developers to build around the platform and come up with new ways of sharing video. To top it off they also announced a “Rule the Beach: Hack Your Way into Viddy” developer competition in a blog post:
For those who haven’t heard of what Startup Weekend is all about, it’s building a company on STEROIDS! From visualization to conception, and actually taking the product to market, a company usually takes about 1-2 years to create. We had exactly 54 hours! This story highlights my experience at the event as a participant.
Last week, I attended an event hosted by The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup at Cross Campus in Santa Monica. World renowned speaker and author, Eric Reiss presented the teachings of his new book, Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better. He is the Content Strategist and CEO of FatDUX, headquartered in Copahagen, Denmark, a global company specializing in user experience with offices worldwide in Los Angeles, Budapest, Zagreb and Prague.
On Tuesday PayPal acquired card.io, a smartphone credit card scanner.
According to Hill Ferguson, VP Global Product PayPal, card.io will integrate its credit card information capturing technology to PayPal’s mobile wallet. The payment details were not made public.
We’re driven by challenges and the desire to win. It’s in our blood as humans, some more than others. Gamification fuels that drive and brings the competition to technology. We see it in web applications, mobile apps, project management tools, etc. But if you’re a company looking to motivate your employees or engage with customers where do you start?
For those companies looking to venture into the mobile space, there are multiple platforms in market to help accomplish the move. However not all those platforms can provide companies with all tools needed. Appcelerator’s Titanium is the only mobile cloud platform to enable fully native-cross platform, mobile app, hybrid and HTML5 web development, from a single codebase.
If you forget everything else I write about creating an app, remember this: every app needs a hook.
Whether you’re making a geo-location check-in app, a financial transaction tracker or a game of some sort, you need a hook to set you apart from the crowd.
