The Gauntlet has been thrown

Ok, not sure why today is asking for more than one post, but TechCrunch has thrown down the glove! They are challenging our east coast startups – here .

It’s posts like this that showcase the problem that we here at triangleappshow are trying to address. While we love techcrunch and their all things tech and startup focus, we believe that the east coast deserves the love. Not all startups are in SF. Even they admit it, but for some reason the East Coast startups are a bit quiet. We don’t think that is really the case, but because of the massive juggernaught that is the podcasting and videocasting community in California, east coast startups don’t get the love.

Make your voice heard!

The Smoffice Competition

Was digging thru my feeds this morning on all things RTP, and saw this great article about a new competition. Go check out SMOffice where they are running a contest for any Startup who wants to get started in Durham, NC. You get the world’s smallest office for 6 months free and a free condominium for 6 months too, just a short 10 minute walk from your new Smoffice.

I love this idea, they are giving away a 20 square foot office inside of a really great little hangout on Main Street in Durham. You will be minutes away from over 70 other startups, and the world famous Durham Bull’s Stadium, where you can check out some great baseball games. Also, within minutes you can walk to Duram’s new DPAC and DAC venues for great national and local performers. What more could you ask for?

How about access to venture capital, and an incredible community of local App Developers? I will be following this contest closely.

Apps are your personal engagement with customers

I used to be a “Webmaster” on a few different websites, back in the early internet days.  I designed and posted the website for a light opera group I sang with in Atlanta.  Back then, the fact that we had two columns with a menu on the left, and scrolling content on the right, was pretty impressive.  I hand coded every page, and learned a lot about html.  A few years later, a bunch of tools came out that made it so “anyone” could design a website.  Note it doesn’t say code a website.  I took my well made, hand coded website and imported it into a tool.  (The name of tool doesn’t matter, just realize that it was a popular name brand tool).  The site went from about 2mb of total content, to about 40mb of content.  This was when 99% of all websites were accessed via modems.  The tool had built a set of standard templates and took my carefully managed images, duplicating them across directories and pages.  This made it “easy” for the tool, but ruined the site for people visiting it.

I personally worry that with the mad rush to get applications on mobile devices, many companies will opt for the easy path. And as such we will see a backlash against the platform because of cookie cutter, bloated apps.  Companies need to see the value of the mobile platform as an extension of their brand into a very personal setting.  You don’t tend to take your laptop with you to bed, or to the bathroom, do you?  But you do read and play games on your tablet or phone in both of those environments.

People carry their phone with them in a very personal way…don’t you want your app to be personally engaging?

Are app factories worth your time?

I was listening to a story on the news the other day, and at the end the section was sponsored by a local app factory. This got me thinking. How much value do companies get out of app factories? Are they really just delaying the time when their developers need to get up to speed on app development?

Is this just the same pattern of the mid ’90s when companies said, we need a website, and so they outsourced it. Only to realize that they got a cookie cutter website?

Local App Spotlight – Downcast

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  Probably way too many podcasts.  When I am traveling on business, I tend to blow thru my iPad data plan in a week.  Additionally, AT&T recently informed me that I am in the top 1% of data plan users of my unlimited iPhone data plan.  In order to keep up with all these  podcasts, I discovered a wonderful podcatcher app a while back, <a href=”http://downcastapp.com/”>Downcast</A>.  Last summer I reached out to tell the makers of this app that I had seen them pop up multiple times on iPad today and various other TWiT podcasts.  I found out that the developer was local!  What a great surprise.  I had a chance to meet him at the Durham Public LIbrary and try to put together the a draft episode of the Triangle App Show podcast.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have good microphones and so that episode may never be shown.  It sounded pretty bad.

Well Seth McFarland (the developer of Downcast), did some major upgrades in late fall/early winter, which makes Downcast an even more powerful podcatcher.  When Apple introduced iCloud many app developers were trying to figure out how to leverage this cloud based storage.  Seth enabled synchronization of your podcasts, playlists, and the position of play across your iPhone and iPad.  This has only improved my podcast listening habit.  Great Job Seth!

 

If you have a favorite app developed by a local developer, why don’t you drop us a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

Is the Triangle really an App Hotbed?

I was reviewing a study that I heard Leo Laporte talk about on MacBreak weekly, that claims that the App Economy has created 466,000 jobs in the last few years.  The article can be found on cNet.  I downloaded the report from TechWeb and saw this graphic – .

According to this study North Carolina doesn’t even rate in the top 10!  Come on app developers.. make your voice heard!

Twitter integration for Wasted Time

So, now that we got the persistance across sessions and meeting restart functions approved and on the app store, it’s time to really focus on Twitter integration.  We are glad we hadn’t gotten to far before this time, since Twitter has officially shut down all apps that are using simple integrations.  So now we have to focus on getting a much better understanding of how the OAuth features work for twitter.  In the mean time we want your feedback on how Twitter integration should work.  There are a few choices that come to mind:

 

1) Tweet when ever a meeting has reached quorum and when it is ended, as long as you have selected that you wish to tweet.  While this would be the simplest, it may not be prudent to tweet that you just wasted a ton of money by being in a meeting with your boss.

2) Only tweet when a meeting has completed.  

3) Only tweet when quorum is reached.

4) Ask at each major point, do you want to tweet about this event, i.e.  If you press quorum achieved, ask if you wish to tweet, or if your meetin ended, instead of asking “Was it worth it”, ask do you want to tweet, and if you answer yes, then ask was it worth it.  This would allow the tweet to say “We just spent $1billion and it was worth it :)”

 

What do you think?  Any suggestions?

Latest Updates

We think we are only a couple of days away from submitting the next version to Apple for the App Store.  Data storage and retrieval between running session is within sight.  Trying to decide if we should wait for twitter integration or submit this version first.