With the recent release of Android 2.0 and the growing number of available devices, we want to give developers a convenient way to test drive their apps on these new devices. We also want to make our Android advocates available to answer any questions you may have.
We are pleased to announce that we will host a series of all day Android developer labs over the next month in the following cities (dates in local time):
Mountain View, CA - Nov 9
New York, NY - Nov 16
London, UK - Nov 17
Tokyo, JP - Nov 18
Taipei, TW - Nov 20
Due to limited space, developers who have already published an application in Android Market will be given priority. You can request a spot on a first-come, first-serve basis by going to this page. We will send a follow-up email with venue information and other registration details to those who have secured a spot.
Thank you for your continued excitement in Android. We look forward to meeting many of you in the coming weeks!
Diversity at Google means having a workforce that reflects the diversity of our customers' perspectives, ideas and cultures -- one that thinks and acts inclusively, and fundamentally values people's similarities and differences.
As part of our ongoing commitment to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, 2007-2008 saw the institution of the Google India Women in Engineering Award, with the objective of recognizing and rewarding deserving women students in the field of Computer Science and Engineering. The initiative has been positively and enthusiastically received by both students and colleges, and is now an established entity in the student community.
With two successful editions behind us, we are pleased to return with theGoogle India Women in Engineering Award, 2010. This year, the award will be open for applications from September 15, 2009 to October 31, 2009, and is open to any woman student of Computer Science, in an under-graduate, post-graduate or doctoral program, that meets theapplication criteria.
Aspirants to the award will be assessed on their academic excellence, passion for Computer Science and demonstrated leadership; the winners will be announced in 2010 and will take home a sum of INR 1,00,000 each. We look forward to inviting the winners for a conclave at the Google India engineering office, comprising of technical discussion with Google engineers, workshops, break out sessions, panel discussions and the award ceremony.
The award has been instituted torecognize women studentswho have made a mark in the field of Computer Science and hope it inspires many more to take up studies in this field and pursue it as a career.
Posted by Jayashri Ramamurti, Human Resources Manager, India
CodeAndroid is the Android Developer group for Singapore, a grassroot developer initiative to promote Android development locally as well as provide network and resources for everyone to benefit from it. Android is an open source operating system for mobile and embedded devices that is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, with the vision to create an open platform for device manufacturers, telcos and developers to foster innovation and speed up the creation of software to meet mobile users' needs. Since its formation in February 2009, CodeAndroid has organized four meet ups and gathered over 50 developers and users for each session, for developers to share their Android experience.
We also welcome non-developers who are interested in learning more about the Android platform and want to pick up basic concepts for development. Please feel free to also attend and network if you are a marketer or business owner looking for people to help you build your Android applications.
Looking forward, CodeAndroid is looking to help other cities around the region to setup CodeAndroid meetups, so as to build an Asia Pacific network of Android developers, to share resources and contacts. Even if you are from outside Singapore, and want to make a contribution to the Android community, feel free to contact us at codeandroid.org@gmail.com!
Check out the Singapore Application Directory for the list of Singapore-developed Android applications. You can also find them in Android Market, accessible via your Android-powered phone like the recently launched HTC Hero.
To keep informed of CodeAndroid happenings, or you wish to contribute to the community, you can follow us via:
IRC Channel (come and chat with us!): #codeandroid on irc.freenode.net (server)
Alternatively you can also download the CodeAndroid widget on your Android phone: Click here on your Android phone to install or search for "CodeAndroid" in Android market.
Mark the date, the next meetup will be on the 26th of September, 2pm at Google Singapore office (we will post up the event post very soon). Stay tuned to our group fan page as we are bringing a web conference call with the folks of Wikitude!
Photos and the slides from our last meetup are below. We would love to see you at our next meetup.
In Japan, developers are quite excited about Wave, and we have been encouraging that excitement at Tokyo GTUG by holding multiple Wave-related events. First, we held a remote hack-a-thon from 25th-27th July, where developers could hack over the weekend wherever was comfortable for them.
On 27th evening, nearly 30 people gathered at Google Tokyo Office to watch Google Wave Engineer Seth Covitz give a tech talk and the hack-a-thon participants show off the results of their weekend. The best application of the night (awarded our "Grand Prix Prize"!) was MindMap, a collaborative brainstorming gadget, written by Mariko Gohda. Check out the screencast below:
Other gadget demos included a scheduling gadget by aodag, and a soccer formation visualization gadget by Nakona. The robots API also got love - Nakano.T created a bot to let Wave users play Shiritori, a word game played by saying a word that starts with the last syllable of the word given by the previous player, and Yasushi Ando wrote a robot that demonstrated using JRuby on Google App Engine.
We then held our monthly user group meeting on August 5th, where more than 100 Japanese developers showed up to hear about Google Wave. Atsushi Nakamura first gave a talk in Japanese about using the Google Wave UI and the various APIs (see pic below). Then, Googler Pamela Fox gave a talk in (slow) English that included a live coding walkthrough of the APIs, where she made a gadget that enabled bidding on her Akihibara-acquired furry cat ears, and a robot that emailed her every time a Wave was updated ("Maileybot").
Coming up, Tokyo GTUG will be hosting events about Maps, OpenSocial, Android, and Chrome/HTML 5. We encourage developers to give lightning talks at all of our monthly meetings, so please let us know if interested. Or, just come and listen and learn with us!
Google recently started a worldwide effort for local developer community building and promotion, and to facilitate the communication and information exchange among the developers. This program is the Google Technology User Group (GTUG). At the moment, more than seventy cities in thirty plus countries around the world has established local GTUG, more than half of them have started their first events.
The first GTUG in Beijing, mainland China , formally established its presence on August 1st. Its objectives are to provide a community for the developers in Beijing and its vicinity areas to gather together periodically to share knowledge and exchange ideas about open source, free software, open web standards, Google products, and web business opportunities.
At its first event on August 1st, Google Greater China President Kai-Fu Lee and China Open Source Promotion Foundation leader Mr. Kewei Song sent congratulatory notes to the event. Mr. Song also presented the current state of open source in China. Engineers from Google China and local developer communities presented OpenSocial introduction, Google Maps and Android. Attendees were satisfied with the opportunity to join this community event. Event attendee group photo are posted here.
Beijing GTUG hopes to see more web developers in Beijing and the surrounding areas join the group and promote web technology together. We welcome developer community leaders in other cities of China also start your own GTUG. Information about how to start a GTUG is here.
Hello, my name is Hidetaka Yamashita, and I am in charge of mixi's OpenSocial Mobile project. I am very happy to announce that mixi has recently added support for mobile phones to our OpenSocial platform. mixi.jp is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 17 million registered users. You may have heard about our recently launched OpenSocial developer sandbox in April. With this announcement, we are introducing our "mixi apps for mobile" platform which is based on OpenSocial's RESTful API using 2-legged OAuth.
Background
In Japan most people use 3G mobile phones that connect to the Internet at max 7.2Mbps. Currently, more people access the web through mobile phones than through PCs. In mixi's case, access from PCs is approximately 30% compared to mobile phone access, which is 70%. Therefore, it is crucial for mixi to offer mobile phone support for OpenSocial applications.
How mixi's mobile platform works
mixi's mobile development platform is targeted for non-native mobile development, where third party developers build mobile social apps on their own application servers. However, when accessing the application from a mobile phone, users still point their phones to the main mixi site as it serves mainly as a proxy to the third party site. As the response returns from the third party site, the mixi Application Proxy processes the response (which is purely content) and merges it into a complete XHTML response (by adding a header and footer). It is then passed back to the requesting mobile phone. Since the core application itself resides on a third party site, developers build their apps using the RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth to securely access social data from mixi.
With mixi's RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth, OpenSocial applications can run anytime, anywhere!
Supported Features
API (requires authentication using 2-legged OAuth). You can access all the core OpenSocial APIs, as well as photos and communities on mixi.
Timeline (for mobile)
Closed beta version - Ongoing now
Consumer launch - September 2009
Official ads program - September 2009
Virtual currency and Payment API - October 2009
To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial mobile platform please visit: http://developer.mixi.co.jp/. (Note: this site is in Japanese.)
Posted by Hidetaka Yamashita, mixi, Inc.
(This post originally appeared on the OpenSocial blog.)
