Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
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For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
With all that’s happening in Appsterdam, I know it’s hard to keep track of everything going on, let alone what’s already happened. To review from a few weeks ago, we expanded to South Holland with Appsterdam Delft.
Since the launch, App Makers from Delft, Den Haag, and Rotterdam have been getting together at Cafe Belvedere at the same time App Makers from Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Utrect have been getting together at Cafe Bax. They’ve been working together at the Appsterdam Approved Hangout at Grand Cafe Sping, as we’ve been working together at Appsterdam Noord at NDSM.
We’ve been busy in Amsterdam as well. We launched Meet the Makers, powered by IceMobile, the last piece of our Summer of Appsterdam infrastructure initiatives. Meet the Makers is how App Makers share their latest and greatest, connecting directly with users.
The event was a blast. IceMobile did a tremendous job with both hosting and presenting. We had a huge turnout, with around 80 people showing up to learn about the new ABN AMRO banking app. Check out IceMobile’s sweet dual beamer action!
Appsterdam Delft is preparing their own Meet the Makers, powered by Sping. Come see the newest apps by App Makers of South Holland: Noodlewerk, Innovattic, ii studio, Share Square, and more.
If you’re an App Maker in South Holland who’d like a free place to work among friends, this is the perfect excuse to check out the Appsterdam Approved Hangout at Grand Cafe Sping. It’s exactly the dream: a private cafe with coffee and wifi, but no live music or screaming babies. It’s a little slice of heaven right next to a tram stop.
Meet the Makers, powered by Sping
August 30th, 14:30 – 17:30
Grand Cafe Sping, Nieuwe Plantage 58, Delft RSVP
This week in Appsterdam, the first ever convening of Apps For The Planet, a two-day sustainability event where people design and build apps for the benefit of the health and future of our planet.
Three months ago at an early Appsterdam Meeten en Drinken, Casper Koomen asked the question: What if a dream team of developers, designers, conceptual thinkers, sustainability experts and charities came together for a 48-hour hackathon to save the planet?
From that conversation sprang Apps For The Planet. An amazing lineup of partners stepped up to support the idea, including Greenpeace, Pachube, 1%club, and, yes, Appsterdam. I have the very great honor of delivering the opening keynote that kicks off a fun, but intense, program packed with lectures and workshops.
And work! Apps need to be built! Experienced and newly-minted App Makers will form teams of four to design, build, and pitch their ultimate planet-saving app to a jury. The theme this time around is “The Home.” Winners take home cool prizes like Wacom tablets.
Why do we do this? We want to stimulate the creation of great planet-saving apps and build awareness about how apps can help solve sustainability issues. And, we want new startups to emerge from all of this. More than a few hackathon teams have gone on to start companies.
Bring your talent, skills, and ideas on Wednesday and Thursday, August 17th and 18th, from 9:00 to 20:00, to the headquarters of BNO, the Association of Dutch Designers, at Danzigerkade 8a, in Appsterdam.
Appsterdam is the best place in the world to be an App Maker. One of the things that makes that is true is the number of coding contests held here. We’re getting to the point where it’s not such a crazy idea to actually live on the free money circuit, each demo propelling your company toward launch.
Apps for Noord Holland is the latest in a series of government-sponsored hackathons that award cash prizes for apps using open data.
Sanoma App Challenge is an open call for ideas, with an awesome prize for best entry. This year’s contest will involve a hackathon in the Appsterdam tent at Picnic.
Google is hosting a competition for Chrome apps for its Dutch Web Store. The best apps will win free Chromebooks and prominent placement.
Shipping a product takes months, but most contests only require a proof of concept, which takes hours. When you’re trying to get started, or are interested in exploring new ideas, contests are a good way to go.
In addition to cash and prizes, winning contests is a great way to make a name for yourself, and the events around them often bring introductions to connections and opportunities. Sometimes the people you meet even losing a contest are worth more than the prize!
Coding contests are also the perfect opportunity to check out a new platform. What better motivator to learn a new skill than the chance to win something in the process?
The past few weeks have been very dark indeed. Rovio and others targeted by new lawsuits, Craig Hockenberry predicting doom, and Matt Gemmell’s morale falling like Stonewall Jackson. The only thing keeping me from joining my colleagues in abject depression is working for an 11th hour rally.
Rally time starts now.
Intellectual Ventures and their ilk are many tentacled beasts who use thousands of shell companies to do their dirty work. When they send blood-sucking tentacles like Lodsys into our community, we need to cut them off.
Eventually the head will figure out to stop losing tentacles. Eventually the patent trolls will learn to avoid indies the way dogs in East Texas learn to avoid anthills.
Of course patent trolls are more likely to be from California than from Texas, so they might not know about the anthills. I actually spent part of my childhood in Texas, and learned the hard way that if you step on an anthill you’ll soon be covered in swarming, biting ants. You could, in theory, crush them one by one, but it’s much easier to just avoid anthills.
Let App Makers be as the ants of East Texas, minding their business until someone invades their anthill. Then Swarm! Swarm! Swarm! We will let the patent trolls know: if you attack one indie, you attack all indies, and we will file every motion we can against you, we will attack your patents, and we will show you for the mafioso thugs you are.
Our general in this fight is Michael McCoy, a Longhorn Texas technology attorney who is also conveniently licensed in California. We’ve been meeting in Amsterdam to hammer out a strategy and form a plan for immediate action.
When he returns to work next week, Michael will assemble and lead the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team, establish the Appsterdam Legal Defense Fund, and start implementing our strategy, codenamed Operation Anthill.
Legal action and education will be the start. We will also consider other ways of protecting ourselves, such as pushing for legislative reform. Of course, our enemies are both wealthier and better connected than we are, so will have to take our story to the people, let the public know that small businesses, jobs, and the economy are being threatened by parasites—and pray that democracy can still prevail.
We must move the fight away from the story that has been conceived by our enemies. This isn’t a patent infringement issue. There’s nothing most of the affected App Makers could have done to avoid being targeted. This is extortion, plain and simple, with the familiar twist of misappropriating the law to harass the very innovators patents are meant to protect.
NPR primed the pump of public awareness with the latest episode of This American Life, “When Patents Attack!” Ready or not, the time to act is now. I propose a tongue-in-check brown ribbon campaign to raise awareness. Brown? Obviously.
Software patents are bullshit.
Steve “Scottie” Scott and John Fox of iDTV recorded an interview with Michael McCoy and me, Mike Lee. (8:15 audio file, MP3 format). If you are a member of the media and would like a high quality copy for your broadcast, or would like to schedule an interview, please contact bmf at le.mu.rs.
Although much of the world’s technology is produced in Silicon Valley, people outside the industry don’t directly benefit from that. The offices in the Valley don’t have better workflows. The municipalities don’t have better websites. It’s like living next to an oil refinery, but not getting cheaper gas.
This is less than ideal, and our community outreach initiatives are intended to make sure locals benefit from the technology being produced by Appsterdam. The first such initiative, launching this week, is called Meet the Makers, powered by IceMobile.
As opposed to Weekly Wednesday Lunchtime Lectures, which are likely to be technical talks of interest only to App Makers, Meet the Makers tells the story behind an app, and should be of general interest, understandable to anyone.
After hearing about the app, you are encouraged to literally meet the maker, to ask questions, and to give feedback. Not only should you get a good idea of what the app means for your life or your business, App Makers should get a good idea of how well they are serving you.
Here are the details of the upcoming event:
Meet the Makers of ABN AMRO Mobile Banking on Thursday, August 4, 2011, 1:30 PM at the offices of IceMobile, Mensinge 2, 1083 HA Amsterdam. RSVP
The Summer of Appsterdam was our plan for spending the summer building the world’s most advanced infrastructure for App Makers. With this we’ve launched all the infrastructure building initiatives we announced at the launch party, and a few more besides.
