Recent Posts
And now for a very important meeting ...
On Friday, December 9, 2011 Jamison and I will be headed to New York for a very important...
Has Ubiquitous Computing Gone MainStream?
I'm honestly pretty excited about the Facebook integration at the Ushuaïa Beach...
How To Engage Developers In Femtocell API Use
For femtocell APIs to be effective, mobile operators must learn how to engage developers...
Finishing School for Potential API Providers
Had the pleasure of speaking with Kin Lane at Gluecon 2011. The topic was APIs and best...
Connected Traveler Demo
What do you get when you combine the power of mobile network APIs and some sweet...
Blog
On Friday, December 9, 2011 Jamison and I will be headed to New York for a very important meeting. A good friend Elizabeth has agreed to carve some time out of her busy schedule to honor Jamison's request for a "real" meeting in a skyscraper.
As this is Jamison's first foray into New York or the business world, Elizabeth and I thought it was appropriate to prepare some slides in advance.
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I'm honestly pretty excited about the Facebook integration at the Ushuaïa Beach Hotel in Ibiza. Yes, it might give me an excuse (as if I need one) to hit the clubs and do some "research" for "work." But more importantly it allows people to update their social networking profiles without staring blankly at their devices (iPhones, Androids, crackberries, etc.).
Maybe it's just a personal pet-peeve, but waiting to start your breakfast, lunch, dinner, birthday party, Bar Mitzvah or wedding because a friend "needs" to check-in to FourSquare first is a serious drag. Multiply that by the number...
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For femtocell APIs to be effective, mobile operators must learn how to engage developers outside their own walls.
Application programming interfaces in femtocells may have a lot of potential, but who is going to exploit it? Mobile operators have historically been used to ‘walled garden’ models, in which applications are developed in-house to retain carrier control over revenues. But the key lesson learned from this is that they must break down those walls.
The most successful projects are open. Operators are starting to realize this, due in large part to the huge success of Apple’s...
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Had the pleasure of speaking with Kin Lane at Gluecon 2011. The topic was APIs and best practices. I've got a fair amount of experience with APIs, and tripped and stumbled a few times to learn a few best-practices. Will describe these headlines in more detail in a few days (Gluecon is still going on!).
If you build it… they won’t come
Common Building Blocks
Innovative Building Blocks
Developer ≠ Developer
Monetization
Customers ≠ Customers
Make it concrete.
Evangelism
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What do you get when you combine the power of mobile network APIs and some sweet enterprise APIs? Well, I'm not exactly sure... and that's the point. At Alcatel-Lucent I spend a lot of time talking to mobile network operators and enterprise customers about "opening" themselves to innovation and new business opportunities through the use of well managed APIs. At Mobile World Congress this year our team was responsible for creating a number of demos that highlight exactly what could be done when businesses start to open up.
The Connected Traveler application prototype uses some cool APIs from...
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When working on APIs and other abstract concepts it's often easier to communicate through the use of demos and prototypes. Of course, a poor demo or misplayed feature can throw your conversation way off course... so tread lightly. The Get Location Demo was created to show how a web or mobile application developer can access network location through the Open API Platform.
What's network location? Glad you asked. Check out this article I wrote for Read Write Web that goes into detail on network location, a bit of its history and some potential use cases. Once you grok that, drop back here and check...
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It seems like only yesterday we announced the start of the 100 Apps In 100 Days challenge, but alas all good things must come to and end. And this contest certainly went out with a BANG! We knew the contest was going to be big, but we didn't expect it to be THIS big. We had 200 developers from TopCoder participate in the contest and received 160 total submissions. Our panel of Alcatel-Lucent and industry judges was blown away by the breadth and depth of the applications submitted. Be sure to catch up with the "Change the World" and "Change the Game" winners in 2011 at Mobile World Congress...
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“Here Comes the Judge(s)!” 100 Apps in 100 Days Deadline Looming!
Posted on December 3, 2010
by Justin Tormey 
0
The deadline is looming for our 100 Apps In 100 Days challenge. I can practically hear all the furious typing and gnashing of code from our competitors around the world.
For those of you sitting on the fence or who may be running low on energy in the final days and hours of the contest, we hope this piece of news will pick you up and give you some motivation to get your apps in before the December 10th deadline. How about a heaping of industry experts to review your apps and pick the grand prize winners?
We've gathered the best an brightest from Alcatel-Lucent, Connected Planet Online,...
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With yesterday's announcement of Facebook read/write APIs into Places, it seems to be a good time to reflect on a) location aggregation, b) finding your lost grandmother, and c) lazy user interaction design.
Sure, there are plenty of services that will let you "check-in" to your favorite restaurant, bar, club, airport, or friend's girlfriend's house. The process is usually quite simple: Fire up an app on your iPhone, Android or smart phone of choice, choose your location, add a witty blurb (or not), and you've joined the throngs of other hipsters broadcasting their latest conquest. Heck, you might...
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It's not much to look at, but its an app nonetheless. Check out the screen shots (above) from my iPhone and Android phones. My app will work for any phone that can send a text message. You can try it yourself, just send a text message (SMS) to 73777 with the following message, "citytime New York" ... You should receive a message back that looks something like this:
The current time in New York is October 13, 11:50:21.
Okay, so we all have clocks and the internets will tell us what time it is in other cities! What's the big deal?
First of all, my app uses the SMS service made available...
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100 Apps In 100 Days – We’ve got some great ideas for you…
Posted on October 8, 2010
by Justin Tormey 0
For the first milestone in the 100 Apps In 100 Days contest we asked developers to submit their application ideas. We were overwhelmed with both the quantity and the quality of the entries. A total of 37 TopCoder developers submitted 110 application ideas! The proposals ranged from simple, but effective, one-page descriptions and hand-drawn wireframes to full-blown, multi-page application requirement documents. They covered a broad range of application concepts from diverse fields, such as augmented reality, medical & health records, video streaming, eCommerce and more.
It took...
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100 Apps In 100 Days – Interview with OpenPlug’s Eric Baissus
Posted on October 5, 2010
by Justin Tormey 0 
In case you missed it, our 100 Apps In 100 Days contest is in full effect and the app ideas are pouring in. We're getting ready to announce the Milestone 1 winners for the best application proposals and the final deadline (December 10) is quickly approaching.
Our friends over at OpenPlug have kindly donated 100-day licenses to their OpenPlug ELIPS Studio software for every developer who registers for the contest. (So far we've fulfilled requests for over 50 licenses!) We though it would be a good time to catch up with Eric Baissus, CEO of OpenPlug, and get his thoughts on the apps movement.
JT:...
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As if today wasn't already a big news day for the team here at Alcatel-Lucent, we have just "one more thing" to reveal... Today we're launching the 100 Apps In 100 Days competition with our friends at ProgrammableWeb and TopCoder.
We're giving away over $165,000 in cash and prizes! Plus three trips to SXSW 2011 for the "Change the Game" app and a grand-prize trip to Mobile World Congress 2011 for the "Change the World" app.
As if that isn't awesome enough, every developer who registers for the contest will get a free 100-day license to use the OpenPlug Elips Studio (compliments...
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Whew! What a weekend! The iOSDevCamp wrapped Sunday evening and we're stoked to have had such an awesome team of TopCoders.
The Alcatel-Lucent App Strike Force not only made the aforementioned What's Happening Now!! App, but the team also somehow found time to build, demonstrate and win two prizes for their own personal apps.
Winning the Paypal sponsored "Best use of PayPal API" was David Bello's, PayFace, which uses the Face.com APIs to do facial recognition and send money to friends. He took home an iPad and a goodie bag full of various technology, gift certificates and assorted happiness.
Winning...
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The App Strike Force rolled into the PayPal HQ in San Jose bright and early at 9 AM. It's now nearly midnight and we're still going strong. The app, tentatively entitled, "What's Happening Now!!" is coming together quite nicely. It's a nifty mashup of the Open API Service Location API, Twitter, Twilio, Fwix. We've hit one snag on grabbing Twitter feeds, but that should be a quick fix for Sunday morning.
The team's also been earning karma points by doing some design work for the Pivotal Lab's app and helping some folks with the video embeds on their cooking app. In the true spirit of a hack-a-thon...
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It's done... or to be more precise, we're done. The App Strike Force team arrived at iOSDevCamp early on Sunday morning to put the finishing touches on the "What's Happening Now!!" app. We're nearly ready to submit and take a much needed break from coding, designing, planning and hacking.
The app uses the Open API Service Location API to find your friends or coworkers and places them on a map. From there we pull in their Twitter feed to see what they've been up to or thinking. This could be useful for a distributed workforce (ahem, Alcatel-Lucent and TopCoder). We ping Fwix to grab local...
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As you may have heard, we've got a team of TopCoders and Alcatel-Lucent hackers headed to the iOSDevCamp this weekend in San Jose, CA. Along the way we picked up a good friend from Pivotal Labs, too. Sweet. The goal: fame and fortune... and bowling shirts. (see below)
After some brief introductory remarks from the iOSDevCamp crew and a word from the event's primary sponsor, PayPalX, the teams broke out into small rooms with whiteboards and caffeinated beverages. So far we've set our eyes on a location aware news and alert app - maybe we'll play up a non-profit or non-governmental organization...
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Want to go to the iOSDevCamp 2010 in San Jose, California? Then get your team together and join the Alcatel-Lucent App Strike Force!
We're looking to build a team of developers and designers to take the iOSDevCamp 2010 by storm. Teams need to submit their idea for an app to be built at the event and if their idea is chosen, the team will be flying high to San Jose to attend the event and build it. So gather your crew and start brainstorming!
Prizes include the trip to the iOSDevCamp 2010, cash, and whatever your team wins at the event is yours!
The contest is running now over at TopCoder...
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What do you get when you mix a top-notch development community, some easy to use APIs, wads of cash, and an iPad? Apparently, you get some awesome iPad applications.
Last month Alcatel-Lucent (my new gig) announced the $40,000 Location-Based iPad App Challenge. The premise was remarkably simple, make an iPad app that uses our LBS API, if it rocks you win. Well, it's been 31 days, the contest has ended and boy do we have some cool apps to show off.
With some help from our friends over at TopCoder (Veredox, I'm looking at you) more than 70 developers registered for the contest and we received...
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Quite possibly the largest single fundraiser on-air and online, Hope For Haiti Now was a massive undertaking. I'm proud of MTV Networks and all of the distribution partners, sponsors, talent and non-profit organizations involved in making this such a success. While my role in this effort was quite small, it makes me glad to be part of an organization that can coordinate and produce an event like this on such short notice and make it look effortless.
If you haven't already, please donate to the relief efforts.
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Born out of a single, undeniable precept, "Reach our audience wherever they are," with the implied sub-text of "or somebody else will." The MTV Networks Content API launched in September 2008, having completed six months of limited release, private beta with a handful of developers. The API gave third-party developers access to the entire MTV music video library, with standards compliant (MRSS, Atom, OpenSearch) and easy to integrate REST services.
This was MTV's first stab at reaching out to third-party developers and growing a community of technical users. The integrations were fast and furious,...
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According to Newsweek, 2007 was supposed to be the "Year of the Widget." At MTV it was 2008 when widgets blew up (in a good way). At Music & Logo we launched the internal White Label Widget Framework that enabled brands to configure and deploy flash-based, embeddable widgets quickly and cheaply. The result? A ton of widgets were launched covering a wide variety of sites, brands and franchises. The sales teams even got involved, pitching these widgets as add-ons to existing deals, generating some significant revenue.
The concept is simple, load a series of Flash-based displays into a widget...
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It's good to have a few side-projects to keep me busy and help sharpen my skills. I joined the communication committee at the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing to help them launch a new website for the congregation. Their old site was put together by a few part-time volunteers and was in need of an upgrade. After consulting with the communications committee and helping them determine their primary goals for the site, I developed an online strategy and technical plan to help them branch out online.
The site was re-launched on Wordpress using a highly customized version of the Mimbo...
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We never run out of interns here at MTV (and free soda, too, but that's a story for a different time). So why not put a few of them to good use for our MTV News' Halloween Makeover photo shoot. This quick project involved a professional makeup artist from MAC Cosmetics some cheap thrift-store costume pieces and a trip downstairs to Times Square to embarrass provide an educational learning experience for our two interns.
The goals were quite simple, along with fashion writer Farrah Weinstein, turn Javier the intern into Davey Havok from AFI, and Danielle into the girl from "The Grudge." Get creeped...
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[jwplayer config="Bekle Player" mediaid="2685"]
After two years in Miami, the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards came back to New York City. The VMA's are like the Superbowl for MTV. It's all hands on deck as the everyone prepares for the biggest traffic and ratings of the year.
MTV News was producing the VMA Preshow and I was tapped to produce the Instant Fashion Profile with Diddy's latest start, Cassie. The goal was to shoot photos while Cassie and her team prepped for the VMA red carpet and get those photos online and on-air in time for her live interview with Suchin Pak.
As you can see,...
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I joined the MTV.com Digital News team during July 2005, to pilot news production on "MTV Overdrive." This was MTV's first "broadband video channel," a non-linear television channel you could watch on your PC. (Sorry, no Macs at the time of launch due in part to Windows Media DRM.) It was programmed and scheduled like television, meant to augment, and in some ways replace, the linear viewing experience. As part of the digital news team I produced, shot, edited and published video news updates to the site on a regular daily schedule and supported breaking news and live events around the clock.
“MTV...
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