TechCrunch
This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Samsung's Galaxy Glut, Nexus Price Cuts, And HTC's Next Step
Is it Wednesday already? It must be, because we’ve got yet another edition of the TechCrunch Droidcast to carry you through the rest of your day (or least the next half hour). This week it’s just Darrell Etherington and I shooting the breeze about the goings-on in the Android world, but there’s plenty for us to dig into.
Samsung has a new tablet for kiddies and confirmed it’ll show off the Galaxy Gear smartwatch next week for starters, and Google has just priced its 8 and 16GB Nexus 4s to move. Meanwhile, poor old HTC may be trying to put together a mobile operating system of its own so it can make some inroads into the Chinese market (and hopefully secure itself a future).
Throw in a bit of Kobo talk (at Darrell’s insistence, being Canadian and all) and a few off-topic moments at the end of the show to tear apart Nintendo’s downright ridiculous 2DS handheld, and you’ve got this installment of Droidcast in a nutshell. Interest piqued? Take a listen below and subscribe to the podcast in iTunes if you’re picking up what we’re putting down.
We invite you to enjoy weekly Android podcasts every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our weekly Gadgets podcast at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the TechCrunch Droidcast in iTunes, too, if that’s your fancy.
Intro music by Kris Keyser.
Come To The Disrupt Hackathon, Leave Smarter - Here Are The API Workshops (And More Tickets!)
The Disrupt SF Hackathon is so damned close that we can almost smell that rare amalgamation of sweat, excitement, exhaustion, and pizza grease in the air.
We’re just over a week away from the big event, where hundreds upon hundreds of coders and designers will be locked in a battle to build the coolest thing they can build in a single 24 hour stretch. The prize? Fame. Glory. Oh, and a nice stack of cash.
Even if you don’t win, you’ll probably walk away with the most important prize of all: knowledge*.
[* Yep, pretty sure that's the cheesiest thing I've ever written.]
We’ve got some pretty great API workshops lined up for the first day of the Hackathon, where you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of a few APIs right from the folks who help make them.
(We’ve also got one of the very last batches of Hackathon tickets available at the bottom of this post — so if you’re still not in, go quick!)
Here’s what to expect:
Amazon Web Services (AWS):
If your mobile application continues to run in the cloud, even when the application is closed, how do you go about providing your customers with useful information about background events? For example, if your application is a game with a leaderboard, how do you notify your users that their leaderboard position has been overtaken by another player? Or, if you’ve created a traffic application, how can you warn users that there is slow traffic ahead? With Amazon Simple Notification Server (SNS), you can transmit push notifications from backend server applications to mobile apps on Apple, Google and Kindle Fire devices using a simple, unified API. In this session, we’ll discuss the benefits of using Amazon SNS for mobile push messaging, and we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to use.
Chevrolet:
Founded in 1911 in Detroit, Chevrolet is now one of the world’s largest car brands, doing business in more than 140 countries and selling more than 4.5 million cars and trucks a year. Chevrolet invites developers to explore what’s possible with in-vehicle and Remote API apps to help drivers bring their digital lives into their vehicles. Add the capability to control millions of vehicles to your app, including location, navigation, remote start, unlock, telemetry & more.
Find out more about Chevrolet’s APIs at http://developer.chevrolet.com
Clover:
Clover is transforming the face of brick-and-mortar commerce by developing Android-based hardware, cloud services, and an open platform for third-party developers, complete with a marketplace enabling merchants to purchase and distribute your apps to all their devices with a single tap. And we’ve partnered with the world’s largest credit card processors to provide you massive leverage.
Michael will give you an architectural introduction to Clover, present our Android and REST APIs, and show some examples of integrating popular apps and services with Clover. He’ll show real-world examples of integrating your existing consumer- and merchant-facing applications with Clover, and how to publish your Android app in our marketplace.
For API documentation see: https://www.clover.com/developers
Dropbox:
Dropbox isn’t just for files anymore! With the recently launched Datastore API, structured data like contacts, app settings, and game state can be synced instantly and effortlessly. Datastores work across platforms (iOS, Android, and JavaScript), support offline access, and resolve conflicts automatically. Of course, Dropbox also has rich APIs for accessing and manipulating files from both web and client apps. Join us in this workshop to learn about the full range of the Dropbox APIs.
Find out more about the Dropbox APIs at https://www.dropbox.com/developers.
Evernote:
The Evernote API lets you tap into the functionality offered by the Evernote service and gain access to the millions of users around the world who use it every day. Using the same API that powers all of Evernote’s native apps, you get full access to a user’s Evernote account, allowing you to create new notes and access existing ones.
In this workshop we’ll introduce the API and look at Evernote’s SDKs, then discuss creating new notes, rendering notes, searching for existing notes and other common operations. You’ll learn how your application can store its data in Evernote, how to tap into the information that a user has already stored in Evernote, and why Evernote is great for more than just note taking.
Find out more about Evernote’s API at: http://dev.evernote.com.
If you’ve yet to attend to one of our hackathons (we tend to throw one on the weekend before each of our biggest conferences), it’s hard to adequately explain what you’re missing. We’ve seen projects of all shapes and sizes, from smart door locks to angry, knife-wielding robots. We’ve had impromptu, 50-person NERF battles break out at 2 a.m. We’ve had projects spin out of the hackathon and go on to be sold for millions.
Plus, everyone who gets on stage and presents a finished project gets into the main Disrupt conference (and all the parties) for free! That’s a $2000+ ticket, on top of the chance to win some massive prizes. If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to build, you’d be crazy not to build it here.
Here’s what you need to know:
- As long as you’re building something, participating in the Hackathon is free. Interested sponsors, give us a shout.
- After 24 hours of building, hackers present their projects to their peers and a panel of all-star judges (we’ll announce those judges in an upcoming post).
- Every hacker who finishes their project and presents on stage gets a free pass to the entire conference, normally valued at around $2,000. Why? Because you’re awesome and we love you.
- The team behind the best hack of the day takes home a cool $5,000, and the top three teams all get to present their projects to the Disrupt audience. There will also be a bunch of prizes awarded by the Hackathon sponsors — more news on those in a few days.
The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs through the night on September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released the a big ol’ batch of tickets. What are you waiting for?
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
If Tinder And Snapchat Shacked Up And Had A Baby, It Would Be Called Swipe
Swipe is the latest in a series of “people discovery” apps to pop up over the last year or so, connecting users after they’ve both expressed interest in one another. In that way, it’s not that much different from apps like Tinder or Let’s Date. But GameChanger Labs, the startup behind the Swipe app, hopes to provide a bunch of features that will keep users coming back for more, even after their users meet one another offline.
If you’ve used a mobile dating app recently, you’re probably familiar with the mechanics of Swipe. Log in with Facebook Connect and the app shows a series of other users who you might be interested in. It’ll let you know if they share interests or friends with you, based upon the info it gets from Facebook. You can also drill down and check out the other user’s description and up to four additional photos.
If it seems like someone you might be interested in, you swipe their photo to the right. If not, swipe left. And if someone you’ve expressed interest in also swipes right on you, well then you’ll be notified that you have a match!
And that’s when the fun starts. In other dating or “people discovery” apps, matched up users can message one another, and that’s about it. You message each other and then eventually you get each other’s other contact info, and then you meet IRL or maybe not… But the point is that after that initial connection, your interaction ends up moving offline, or at least off-app.
Swipe wants to be different — it wants to provide ways that its matches continue to communicate with each other after they’ve connected. The first feature it’s enabled to do that allows users to send photos to their matches, and just like Snapchat, have those pictures disappear after a period of time.
Ephemeral photos don’t have to be shot in the moment, as they do in Snapchat, but they can be sent to multiple matches at once. So you can send your favorite selfie to everyone you know shares an interest in you, all at once.
For Swipe, those interactions are designed to take it beyond being just a dating app and to become a “mobile entertainment platform,” according to co-founder Jon Viner. Photos are just the first step. The company is looking to add more interactions over time, including the ability for matches to share stickers, doodles, and play mobile games together — all from directly within the app.
That means creating a whole new social graph within Swipe, of course. But it also means that its users aren’t as likely to take their conversations with other users to SMS, or email, or whatever the kids are using these days.
GameChanger Labs was founded by Jon and Josh Viner, brothers who came out of the social gaming space. They previously built the Facebook sports game “PageFad,” which had millions of users around the world. To help grow their latest venture, the two recruited former Zynga VP of studios Bill Mooney as their COO. While there, Mooney was in charge of games like Farmville, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars.
The startup already has 15 employees working on building new features and interactions into the app, thanks to an undisclosed round of seed funding. While GameChanger Labs won’t say how much it’s raised to date, investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bullpen Capital, Blumberg Capital, Matt Ocko, Tarkan Maner, and Karl Jacob.
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