GTUG Tokyo is Riding the Wave

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!

Posted by Takashi Matsuo, GTUG Tokyo