Frenchy Le Tech

I went to the French American Tech Connection event last night. Here are my summaries:

http://blog.vpod.tv/
Create your own tv show online! They accept video from anywhere, let you edit it online, and transmit it to anywhere.

http://411sync.com
This is sort of cool. They let other services go mobile easy. For example, kayak made a service for them so if I text “kayak sfo to lax” to 411sync I can get back prices for flights. They were vague about their technology but said they received sms messages using a “sim card hooked up to some other technology.” They denied having a cell phone sitting in their living room that received all their messages.

http://www.soonr.com
These guys make wap apps of your favorite desktop apps. From a wap page on my phone I can use outlook. I think you can edit and create events, they demoed that you can at least delete events. Spongecell needs wap. Soonr also lets you use skype from your cell phone which would be useful for internationals.

http://www.4info.net
They claim to be the google of the cell phone. and to have free form NLP. Spongecell prides itself on its NLP so of course I gave these guys a hard time. I asked for an example of the free form NLP and they said you could query for “sf movies” in addition to “movies sf” and get back the same response. They also gave me a postcard of search terms that were useful. They had a movie playing in the background of someone peeling potatoes with their feet.

Spongcell at Carson Workshop, api, api, api

I went to the Carson Workshop in London last week. This picture is proof:

The big message was that every application should have a mountain of public apis. Flickr and Amazon are always the big examples. Spongecell has a few channels for retrieving events and some methods for creating events and we’ll have some more soon.

Someone presenting at Carson mentioned that once you publicize an api you cannot change it. People will be using that api and how are they going to recall that application they created that uses your api? They can’t. So make sure the api is right the first time.

That’s swell, I thought. I’ll think about my apis before I put them out there.

and then yesterday the president discovered this script!!!

I didn’t tell anyone they could use my javascript functions as a public interface! We had planned on people sending and receiving data with spongecell but I never expected someone to stick their fingers into our innards. This is great! People have asked us to become open source but there’s no need to ask. Just create a grease monkey script and you are in control.

Mr. w4g3n3r wrote a greasmonkey script that enables the scroll wheel inside of spongecell. Scrolling up or down will change the days displayed in your calendar. You can also zoom out and in if you scroll while holding the space bar down. I never got around to including this functionality mostly because browser scroll-wheel support is poor for macs. Thank you Mr. w4g3n3r! now I don’t have to write this.

I never thought I would write a blog but now I need some way for you to hear my exclamation.

Sponge-worthy

You are sponge worthy.