We hosted the OpenSocial Summit in Korea at the Google office on November 18, 2008, and it was the 1st OpenSocial event with Korean OpenSocial partners and developers.
















We first were planning to host 60 people and send invitations to 80 developers and partners. However, we got 94 RSVPs and more than 90 people came to the summit. The room at the Google Korea office was literally packed. About a half of the attendees were from large Korean portals and social networks including Daum, Paran, Cyworld, SK Telecom, Nexon, and Neowiz. The other half were developers, from independent developers to large Korean content providers.

During the summit, Google gave three presentations.
- Mickey Kim: OpenSocial update and why OpenSocial
- Chris Schalk & Jiwoong Lee: OpenSocial technical overview + technical presentation & demo for containers
- Arne Roomann-Kurrik & Yung Choi: Technical presentation & demo for application developers

Also four OpenSocial containers in Korea gave impressive presentations.
- Daum: Talked about four reasons for OpenSocial, which are 1) Rich widget, 2) Participations of developer community, 3) Strengthen Daum's community services, 4) Reliability.
- Paran: Talked about how OpenSocial will make Paran more open and social ans how Paran is partnering with and supporting key applications developers in Korea.
- Myspace Korea: Talked about how Myspace is using OpenSocial to operate Myspace developer platform and MyOpenSpace API.
- IDtail: Showed entertaining and interactive demos of IDtail's OpenSocial applications.
















In the afternoon, we had two break-out sessions.
- OpenSocial round table: Containers and developers freely discussed random issues and networked.
- Hackathon: Many developers won OpenSocial T-shirts! :)


Thank you for all attendees and we look forward to more OpenSocial events in Korea.

Mickey Kim, New Business Development

It's been almost a month since the first DevFest in Singapore.  Have you brushed up on the OpenSocial documentation, built a few simple apps, and are now looking to hack with like-minded developers?  Yes?  Then there's good news!

Google Singapore will be hosting an OpenSocial Hackathon at the Google office.  At the same time, eXo Platform and Webpal Networks will be holding an OpenSocial Hackathon in Hanoi.  

Interested in attending?  Places are limited so sign up quick!

Sign up for the Singapore OpenSocial Hackathon 

Sign up for the Hanoi OpenSocial Hackathon 

Bring your laptop, charger, enthusiasm, and ideas.  Food and wi-fi will be provided by the organisers.  There will be talks, brainstorming, and a share-and-tell at the end of the day ... and oh, of course, hacking!

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer

Hey, mates!

Now that I'm fully settled in Australia and close to acquiring a near perfect Australian accent, I'm working on various events for Aussie developers. Here's what's coming up in the next 3 weeks:


Google Developer Hackathon @ the Open Source Developers' Conference 2008
Dec. 2nd, 9am-5pm

OSDC attendees can join us for a day of introducing & coding OpenSocial, OpenLayers, and Google App Engine applications. Also join us during the main OSDC conference later that week in watching the keynote by Chris DiBona, dinner keynote by Anthony Baxter (he's given me a preview, it'll be a riot), and various talks by Googlers: "(Literal) World Dominination" by Tim Ansell, "The State of Python" by Anthony (again). Stop by our table on Thursday for some blinky pins, demos, and information on hiring.


iGoogle OpenSocial Hackathon
Dec. 13th, 2-9pm

Web developers are invited to come to the Google Sydney office for a half-day of hacking in the iGoogle OpenSocial sandbox. You can read more about the event and register over at the OpenSocial wiki.


Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

The fellow Google App Engine developers in Shanghai is organizing the second Google App Engine Camp on November 22nd at Google's Shanghai office.

The event will start with a round of lightening talks, after which you can meet other Google App Engine coders to discuss and develop your App Engine projects.

For more details, please visit the website and join the local discussion group.

Vivian Li, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

What a couple of weeks it's been! We completed the first two stops of the Google DevFest tour in Beijing and Shanghai with a total of 150 developers in attendance.

There were some great presentations on OpenSocial, the Google Maps API, and Google App Engine. These presentations were given collaboratively between our local product engineers in China and engineers that flew out from the Googleplex in Mountain View for two weeks. The presentations
can be found here:

Maps: http://tinyurl.com/6yavmf
OpenSocial: http://tinyurl.com/6dceq6
AppEngine: http://tinyurl.com/5jn5yx

There were also two presentations given entirely in Chinese, so for those that can read them, here those are:

OpenSocial: http://tinyurl.com/6x3pjo
AppEngine: http://tinyurl.com/56q8ux
**The Maps talk was translated on the fly, so there is no presentation in Chinese for that.

At our event in Beijing we also saw an announcement from 51.com, a very large social network in China, about their support for OpenSocial v0.8. 51.com hosted their own developer day the following week at their office in Shanghai. Pretty exciting stuff for OpenSocial!

Pictures from our DevFest event in Shanghai are here. The DevFest event in Beijing pictures are here.



Thanks to everyone who came out!

Jason Costa, Developer Relations, Asia Pacific

We hosted India's first developer event in India on Oct 18th in Bangalore, Google Developer Days are a chance to learn about Google developer products from the engineers who built them. This event received an overwhelming response from the developer community with an attendance of about 250 - 300 developers. It was amazing to see how enthusiastic developers in Bangalore are about Google's Developer Offerings !

The event started off with a key note from Prasad Ram who heads Google Labs in Bangalore. His keynote address gave an inspiring journey we have made in the field of computing, from era of main frames to desktop taking over in many areas, and finally cloud computing making a come back. This was followed by elaborating on Google's offerings on the client side platform for cloud computing as well our foray into Mobile market with launch of Android as an open source project.



Extracts from the online article by Anand Parthasarathy from Hindu.

"Create your applications using our ‘Open’ software tools. Then run it on Google infrastructure. We will take care of all the technical and administrative problems. We will run your applications till they attract 5 million page views a month. Then you know it works - and you can monetize it in any way you like”.



Developers were really excited and engrossed throughout the day in tech talks as well as code labs covering areas like Google Maps APIs, OpenSocial, Google App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Indic Translation APIs. Session details can be found here.

Last but not the least, feedback from the developers were very positive and heartening.

"It was an interesting day. Google speakers were pretty awesome and I think that I found amazing was that they were very keen on getting feedback on their tools and api from the audience. I also found every googler using chrome and deploying all their sample code on app engine. A true eat your own dog food environment. (Prateek Dayal)"

"In its first edition of GDD India it was a very good start. My suggestion would be to plan a 2 day event for GDD 2009 with tech talks on the first day and hands on sessions on the second day. (Anurag)"

Don't forget to check out the photos as well as videos and presentations from GDD India 2008. Thank You Developers in India for making this event successful and see you at Google Developer Days in 2009.

Rajdeep Dua, Developer Relations, India

After finishing up the DevFest tour in Southeast Asia (with some voice loss after excessive rapping in Manila), I took my first trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to be a speaker at FOSSmy. FOSSmy is a 2-day conference that revolves around open-source development, and is modeled after other FOSS conferences in the world - FOSSin, FOSDEM, etc. Several dedicated Malaysian developers started organizing the conference just 2 months ago, and managed to secure a great venue (stable WiFi, ftw!), a diverse lineup of speakers from both Malaysia and abroad, and an audience of over 250 people - many of them developers that had heard about the awesomeness of open-source, and wanted to use the conference to get a kickstart in it.

My personal FOSSmy experience began at the speakers party, where I met the other speakers (like Toru, memcache + mixi hacker extraordinaire), found out that I lack the patience to play "Mao" (Pie's favorite game), and discovered a use for my growing collection of foreign coins (make-shift poker chips!). The next day commenced with a talk from Ditesh, one of the organizers and my gracious chauffear from the airport. Ditesh gave us a whirlwind tour of the various open-source activities going on in Malaysia, both enlightening the audience about some of the very popular OS projects that originated in the country (like ADOdb and Hex Live CD), and highlighting the future work needed to increase OS activity ("dedicated stuff/funding"). Throughout the day, I also listened to Kamal's talk on git (from slides: "Learn a new version control system every year"), Pia's talk on OLPC(favorite part: Pie fervently dropping the laptop on the floor to demonstrate its robustness), and Jerome's talk on SaaS/PaaS (with great comparisons of offerings like AppEngine, Zoho, Amazon EC2).

I also gave two talks myself. At the first talk (organized by the girls of FOSSchix.my ), I discussed my experiences with university outreach and introduced an initiative called "webdevedu" that aims to create easily re-usable lessons and labs about web development. I got great feedback from Pie, who recommended reaching out to Australian universities and using the open-source Moodle system to actually host the content. At the second talk, I explained the goals and history of the HTML5 specification, and then showed a bunch of HTML5 demos in various browsers, proving that there's already features that developers can start playing with right now, and finally, I encouraged developers to join the mailing lists and send feedback on the spec. According to the twitter stream, the audience was learning (or "getting schooled") from the talk:

yoonkit: "HTML5: Drag&Drop without hacky JavaScript code. Supports events"

kamal_fariz: getting schooled on iframe hacks for cross-domain communication by @pamelafox

brianritchie: #fossmy participants are the first people that have seen HTML 5 canvas Car Nav implementation thx to @pamelafox .. cool..very

You can check out the slides below, or watch the tech talk by Ian Hickson that inspired my talk:

Overall, I was impressed by the enthusiasm and attitude of the Malaysian developers. They're going out of their way to push forward the state of open source in their country, and also going through the effort needed to create more of an actual community of developers. In the next few weeks, there will be a StartupCamp in Kuala Lumpur and a BarCamp in Johor Bahru. The Malaysians prove that developers anywhere can find a way to band together, communicate, collaborate, and form a community around their common interests. I'm now living in Sydney, Australia, for the next 5 months, and I look forward to finding out the ways in which Aussie developers form communities.

Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Australia