In a Google+ post over the weekend, the Google Developers page shared some images from the two Glass Foundry events. There’s not much new information, but we do get to see somebody besides Sergey Brin wearing Glass.

Google Developers1 day ago

A couple weeks ago, we held two hackathons for a small group of lucky developers from among those who signed up for the Glass Explorer Program at Google I/O 2012.  We called these events the Glass Foundry.  In San Francisco and New York, the selected Glass Explorers were able to spend two days with Glass and the API we’ve developed.  They formed teams and built over 80 new ways to use Glass.  Everyone who demoed received a special edition glass bar identifying them as a “Pioneer” of this next generation of computing.  Eight hard-working teams won the grand prize: Google will pick up the cost of their Glass Explorer Edition.

The Glass Foundry was a great opportunity to get our engineers working next to developers on Glass and the API.  We discovered that we all shared a passion for the future of wearable technology, and the feedback we received is already helping us improve the platform.  The whole event was deeply rewarding for our team and the participants seemed to have a great time, too.  We hope to have more Glass Foundries in the future.

Although the details of the API are still confidential, we did want to share the photos in the attached album.  If you'd like to know more about developing for Glass and you'll be at SXSW this year, we recommend you attend Building New Experiences with Glass (http://goo.gl/pLoUu) with +Timothy Jordan  on Monday, March 11th at 5pm in Ballroom A of the Austin Convention Center.

+Timothy Jordan +Sarah Price +Ossama Alami +Jenny Murphy +Alain Vongsouvanh 

photos by Daniel Gaines Photography and Philip Montgomery403    78 Powered by socialditto

Here’s a few of the choice pictures from the event:

For more info on Google Glass, check out this recent documentary made about the technology. Google also talked about the process of making Glass at a recent TED talk.

The White House announced today that Petitions 1.0, the code that the We the People site runs on, is finished. Now the team will be working on Petitions 2.0. Here’s the details from the White House blog:

In software development, when you go from one version number to another it means that something big is going on. We’re taking a new approach to how the application works, one that starts with the assumption that it should be as open, transparent, and flexible as possible.

As a result, Petitions 2.0 is based on an application programming interface, or API, that we will release to the public in the coming months. The first set of methods, Read API, will be released in March, 2013 and will allow anyone to retrieve data on petitions, signatures, and responses. Later, we’ll release a second set of methods, Write API, that will allow other websites and apps to collect and submit signatures without directly sending users to WhiteHouse.gov. With this API in place we’ll be able to decouple the presentation and data layers of the application and build a new, streamlined signature process. This also means that developers who reuse our code will be able to choose which database the application relies on. Between that and our continued work on a white label theme, Petitions 2.0 will be easier for others to contribute to and reuse.

Before any of this is made public, however, the White House staff will be inviting a small number of developers to the White House Open Data Day Hackathon. Those invited will receive access to the new API methods before the event so they can mess around with it for a bit. At the event itself, developers will show off what they have done, and submit examples to be included with the public SDK.

Are you interested in building the next open platform of citizen/government relations? If so, you can apply to join the hackathon here. If you are selected, you’ll be notified no later than February 8.

Out of dozens of app submissions, Foursquare has chosen a winner. The Grand Prize goes to Gym Shamer, an app that allows users to set fitness goals and then calls them out, publicly, when they fail to meet them.

Let’s say you set a personal goal of going to the gym three times in a week, If you don’t end up checking-in at the gym three times, Gym Shamer will publish that embarrassing news via your own Twitter and Facebook accounts.

It may look something like this:

Other Grand Prize winners include Reward Board, an app that allows business owners to display real-time check-ins at their stores – including information on the mayor and leaderboards. Those business owners can set up rewards if they want, and even print out receipts for check-ins.

And there are now over a dozen new apps you can connect to your Foursquare account, as they have been given Jury Prize honors from Foursquare. One such app is called FlashSquare, which is like Snapchat (or Facebook’s Poke). It allows users to share photos upon checking-in, but they will only be visible for a few seconds. Another app, DinerBeware, informs users about Health code violations at restaurants at which they check-in.

For a complete look at all the prize winners, head on over to the Foursquare blog.

Facebook told reporters yesterday that their seemingly annual F8 conference would not be happening this year. The reason being that Facebook hasn’t shipped a major new product this year. In fact, the company is still pushing Open Graph, which was introduced at last year’s F8 conference.

For their part, Facebook is still pushing development on the Facebook platform, but in other ways. A conference doesn’t let Zuckerberg and crew get intimate with developers. That may be why the company vouched for putting more emphasis on World Hack 2012 with more locations around the world. In fact, the Facebook crew is hosting a Hackathon in Barcelona today.

Facebook will hold other F8 conferences in the future. The developers who love gathering together and talking about the latest movements in the Facebook scene need not worry. It’s just that Facebook needs something on par or greater than Open Graph to make such an extravagant event worth the cost. The company does have to answer to investors now, and a conference without any major announcements could only hurt their market growth.

As for now, Facebook is going to keep focusing on mobile growth. They have the desktop development market squared away, but the mobile market is still an untamed frontier ripe for the taking. Facebook may be the big name in town, but a small start up could easily usurp them. The next F8 conference will undoubtedly address this potential problem.

[h/t: All Things D]

Chad Ruble’s mother suffers aphasia after she suffered a stroke some years prior. Since then, she hasn’t been able to use a keyboard due to her inability to recognize letters. Obviously, it has impacted her ability to send her son, and other people, emails or other messages over the Internet. Her son found a simple and elegant solution that owes its success to the Kinect.

As you can see, the interface includes a number of emoticons with corresponding bars to indicate the level of that emotion. Through this, his mother can send simple messages that tell him and others how she is feeling at the time.

Ruble plans on adding more functionality to the app soon with more emotions and messages. He’s also working on spacing the emoticons so that his mother won’t accidentally switch emotions while she’s heading to push the send button.

It’s these kind of stories that make hackathons truly worth it. It’s all about creating technology and software that can be used to further the advancement and betterment of mankind. Technology continues to improve so that we may reap the benefits and help those who need it most. Giving the ability to communicate through text to somebody who hasn’t been able to for the past 12 years is pretty special.

[h/t: TechCrunch]

The Events redesign was born out of a Facebook hackathon, as Bob Baldwin explains in a Facebook Engineering note:

Together, we built a new list and day view, and incorporated posts, photos and videos. We touched up details like making the Events icon dynamically update to today’s date, rather than showing a permanent “31” as before. After incorporating feedback from an internal test, we were excited to roll it out and take our hackathon project full circle.

Today we announce a new list and calendar view that makes it easier to scan upcoming birthdays, invites and suggested events. Scroll through these events and respond to invites without leaving the page. Suggested events are recommended to you based on your friends, Pages you like, places you’ve checked in at and the apps you use on Facebook.

The new calendar view lays out all of your upcoming events, birthdays, and suggested events in easy to navigate grids. Hovering over any aspect of the calendar will trigger a detailed pop up, where you can join, decline, or navigate toward the event’s page.

Hovering…

Clicking on a square also opens up the events and birthdays of the day. From the top of the calendar view you can create an event, change the date, or even export your events to iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar.

List view organizes all of your events and birthdays in a list, obviously. From that list you can reply to invitations and even post to friends’ Timelines when their birthdays come around – without ever leaving the Event page. Each event is easily removable if you simply click to “x” at the top right.

A mini calendar on the left hand side assist with navigation:

Facebook Events, a feature that has stood the test of time with users, really needed and update – and this is a good one. Using the calendar view makes me wonder how we went this long without this setup for Events, it’s that intuitive. Although there are surely tweaks to be made to improve new Events, this is a gigantic step forward.

LinkedIn announced a while back that they would be hosting a global hackday in Mountain View from June 30 to July 1. The event was aiming to inspire women to put their coding and development skills to the test as they work on new projects during the weekend. The excitement and demand for the event was apparently through the roof, so LinkedIn will be holding a separate hackday in Delhi, India during the same weekend.

Both events will be the same – teams or solo participants will have one day to build something great. The event is more about meeting other women developers, but LinkedIn has a few more incentives besides having an awesome night on the code with your fellow ladies. They promise that yoga and prizes will be available as well.

The Mountain View hackday has also announced its four judges. Keeping with the spirit of the event, all of them are major players in the tech industry who happen to also be women. The four judges are Christina Allen (Director of Product Management at LinkedIn), Gina Bianchini (Founder and CEO at Mighty Bell), Megan Quinn (Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), and Rashmi Sinha (CEO of Slideshare).

All women of all skill levels are invited to both hackdays. They encourage the experienced developers and designers to be tutors to amateurs and those just starting. It should start the foundation for long lasting relationships that may bud into mentorships. It’s all about getting women more interested in technology and computer science. I hope the events go well, especially the hackday in India.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, announced a collaboration with the I/O Extended team to host the “Develop for Good” hackathon. The event is looking for hackers to become the Batman of the Internet with their coding skills. It’s open to anybody as long as they’re at a Google I/O Extended event. If you don’t have one near you, start your own and become a Batman in your own right.

So what problems will you, the hacker Batman, be tackling during this hackathon? Google has selected three problem areas where they want developers to focus on:

Google Ideas: Conflict reporting for blackout situations in repressive regimes.
Google Politics & Elections: Citizen Engagement for Politics & Elections.
Google Green: Help us all be a little bit greener!

The nice thing about this hackathon is that it isn’t restricted to the event itself. Developers can start coding away now on projects to bring to their respective I/O Extended events. The only stipulation is that each entry has to be submitted to this Web site by 11:59 p.m. on June 29.

After the event concludes, Google will select one winner from each challenge. The winning teams from each challenge will each receive up to five Google I/O 2013 tickets alongside the honorary title of Batman of the Internet Google Developer for Good 2012.

But wait, there’s more. Google will select an additional winner that had the best Web app across all three challenges. Every member on that team will get a new Chromebook. I assume it will be one of the Samsung models, but it could be the Acer as well.

If you feel like doing some good in the world, you can sign up for the hackathon by contacting one of the I/O Extended events. Here’s hoping that somebody makes an app that recycles all those cardboard pizza boxes stacking up by my door. I’m too lazy to carry them down to the recycling bin.

Last night, Facebook employees stayed up all night for the company’s latest hackathon, events where everyone in the company is encouraged and challenged to create and inspire each other. While normally the hackathons are focused around taking stabs at wild ideas for the Facebook website, or to hack the spaces Facebook has chosen to inhabit, last night’s hackathon looked more like a party to celebrate the company’s impending IPO.

Francis Luu, a product designer at Facebook uploaded dozens of photos to his Facebook account chronicling the event. To start off, here is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself kicking off the hackathon celebration with a speech:

During the night, the chairs were cleared out of the courtyard for some intramural street hockey:

This LEGO wall hack just might be my favorite:

We may not see much of a result on the Facebook website coming from this particular hackathon, seeing as it was fueled by Anheuser-Busch:

The hackathon wasn’t all celebration, though. Employees did settle in with their laptops for some old-fashioned coding and design hacks:

You can see the rest of the photos over at Luu’s Facebook page. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook will be able to keep this sort of culture alive once it has to report to investors every quarter. The symbolism of the same bell ending the hackathon and signaling the beginning of Facebook’s corporate status was hard to miss.

(Photos courtesy Francis Luu)
(via Venture Beat)

Tonight, to help celebrate the company’s upcoming IPO, many Facebook employees will be staying up all night to participate in an overnight “hackathon,” much like from The Social Network‘s hacking scene (posted below).

During the hackathon, expect some new ideas for the social networking site to be conjured up, because many other features on Facebook have come out of hackathons as well. For a full defintion of what a “Facebook Hackathon” is, I have provided an elaborate quote from TechCrunch below.

“Facebook Hackathons are a chance for employees to work on half-baked ideas and turn them into real products that eventually get shipped. Everything from Facebook’s chat system to an early version of Timeline called ‘Memories’ have come out of Hackathons.”

For those employees who think that sleep is not optional, you may find pictures added to the company’s Sleeping at FB album.

There has been some pretty good Twitter reaction to this upcoming hackathon as well: