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.
Open data is crude oil to an App Maker—money just sitting on the ground waiting for someone to suck it up. The Netherlands is the Saudi Arabia of the information age. Not only are there billions of barrels of data to be exploited, the government will pay you to do so.
The Netherlands has a truly open government, which means that you, as an App Maker, have the keys to the city, or, if you prefer, the API to the Matrix. This being home to the world’s most advanced infrastructure for App Makers, there are several organizations here to help you take advantage of that.
Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government) for example is working on documenting the Matrix in English and Dutch. That way, when you walk through town, you will see not problems, but opportunities to make a living by making things better.
The latest dataset to be opened for the plunder is that of the province of Noord-Holland, which is offering up €13.000,- in bounties via the Apps for Noord-Holland contest.
They’re also hosting an event this summer that sounds like a legend in the making. Imagine this: you’re transported by boat to an island fortress where you and your fellow App Makers will spend the day coding and collaborating, your every need met by your generous and mysterious host.
Doesn’t the whole experience just seem so cinematic? It’s hard not to imagine some oddball super-villain welcoming us to the island while stroking a cat. There’s no way I’m going to miss that, and it gets better.
This is just the latest in a series of contests where App Makers can win real money just for working on cool projects. Some places have poker circuits. Appsterdam has hackathons. There’s your angel funding right there, amirite?
More proof that Appsterdam is the best place in the world to be an App Maker.
On Thursday, July 28, we launch yet another piece of the World’s Most Advanced Infrastructure for App Makers: Appsterdam Guru Sessions. These in-depth, hands-on workshops are the best way to refresh your knowledge and master new concepts.
The four-hour workshop will teach the meta-topic of Test-Driven Development, illustrated in Objective-C and MacRuby. If you don’t have Objective-C experience, or don’t even have a Mac, no problem—you will be paired up with someone who does.
Doors open at 12:00, and you’ll have an hour to settle in with a light lunch. The workshop ends at 17:00, whereupon you, head crammed full of knowledge, will wind down with beer and pizza.
Admission is cheap as hell at €20 a seat, but spaces are limited, so you need to RSVP immediately.
Food and drinks are provided by Apps for Noord Holland, which is the latest contest awarding cash prizes for apps using open data. I still can’t wrap my head around that. Open data is crude oil, money just laying there waiting to be made. Then they pay you to use it. Haven for App Makers indeed.
One more thing: if there’s interest, there’s talk of doing the workshop again later, but from an Android perspective.
In my last post I suggested that one opportunity presented by the American Patent War would be for Europe to develop a new app platform that would be out of reach of Silicon Valley’s technology tax.
That got me thinking about what my dream platform would look like. I imagine something that belongs to the community, built and controlled by App Makers themselves. Something that combines the best of existing platforms, but learns from their mistakes, and improves upon them.
Obviously we want the platform to be open, but we also see value in Apple’s strict controls on quality. I think the solution to this is to allow developers to sell directly to users, while also creating an App Shop with strict quality controls to make it easy for users to find the best apps.
Indeed, I think the most powerful tool a platform provider has is its seal of approval. Right now that comes in the form of being featured on the App Store, App Marketplace, or what have you. But that could also just be a seal.
On the hardware side we pretty much just want the iPad. Apple could provide that hardware. The EU could require them to allow third-party operating systems on their hardware. Monkies could fly out of my butt.
As much as I hate to say something like this, Apple doesn’t actually make iPads, as Samsung has demonstrated. We either commission a really nice piece of hardware, or we just make the thing hardware agnostic, using strict specifications to stay out of fractured hell.
I’m sure a lot of people will fixate on the hardware. I’m not trying to start a flame war here, but I don’t think hardware is the biggest issue. Look at the success of the Game Boy over the superior Game Gear, Lynx, and others. The platform that wins is the platform that has the apps.
How do we program the thing? Ideally we don’t choose one language, but make it easy to expand to any language, perhaps by compiling to a common meta-language, such as C. That way the nerds don’t have to fight over their favorites.
That would also make the Europad the ideal platform for exploring new programming paradigms, like graphical programming for kids—what Smalltalk and Cocoa could have been.
Much has been made of Lodsys, and we have heaped scorn upon them. But Lodsys is nothing but a container for scorn, a shield in East Texas, one shell in a game of shells designed to distract us from the real villain—Silicon Valley itself.
At the core of a network of thousands of patent trolls lies the biggest troll of all, a protection racket called Intellectual Ventures. If you’d like to know more about Intellectual Ventures and their relationship with Lodsys and other trolls, I recommend the latest edition of This American Life, who did a story on the subject.
The story was familiar, but the conclusion was novel—Intellectual Ventures is a Silicon Valley startup, funded by venture capitalists who are expecting massive returns, which are only possible by squeezing as many revenue streams as possible.
One thing you have to know about the Valley is that, underneath its non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, it is completely incestuous. The same investors, the same funds, the same companies come up with their finger in the same pies again and again and again.
That means that when IV and their horde of hypodermic parasites land on other Valley companies, the licensing fees are just moving money around between the same people. The only real revenue is from Valley outsiders—indies and foreigners. You know, the ones they laugh at.
When you follow the money all the way through the complex tunnels of financial and legal confusion, you end up at the Valley itself. This whole patent war is really just a huge anti-competitive play that the Valley has made, intentionally or not, to screw the rest of the technology world.
A Silicon Valley refugee such as myself, who has fled to a jurisdiction with a saner patent system, finds himself stuck, because all the serious platforms are based in or around the Valley.
Even if a European company makes apps to sell in Europe, they still have to go through a Valley company, making them potential victims of this whole scam. The EU is going to need to step in to protect its technologists from this American madness.
There is also an opportunity here. I’ve said before that this nonsense is going to leave the US a third-world pariah in technology. Right now the calculus must be that even if they lose the App Makers to broken healthcare and immigration systems, they still control the platforms.
But for how long? Because right now the US patent system is every app platform’s major weakness. If someone were to exploit that by making a decent platform out of reach of American attorneys, I and most other developers would flock there.
The summer weather in Amsterdam reminds me a lot of Hawaii, the mix of sun and rain. This was on display yesterday as 20 intrepid Appsterdammers set out on an urban safari across the marvel that is the Artis Zoo for our first Appsterdam Family Weekend.
We had a good mix of people: adults and children, expats and locals, stalwarts and newbies. We got together at the Artis gate of what is properly called Natura Artis Magistra (Nature the Teacher of Art), the 19th century garden in the heart of the Dutch capital.
Each of the three gates bears one part of the name, and the popularity of the Artis gate, and of the garden’s grand menagerie, led to the more common designation that we know it by today: the Artis Zoo.
Despite the naming confusion, Artis is more than just a zoo. It also hosts an aquarium, a planetarium, and two museums. There is a good mix of indoor and outdoor exhibits and attractions, which makes it perfect for mixed weather.
I’ve been to a lot of zoos. I’m a big fan of them. I got the VIP tour at the St. Louis Zoo for a fundraiser I did for the Madagascar Fauna Group. I got married at the Honolulu zoo. I have a good base of reference when I say the Artis may be my favorite zoo.
I also love lemurs. I’ve championed a bunch of lemur-related causes. I made a nice donation to the Lemur Conservation Foundation while I was in Florida so I could stop by and visit their lemurs. When I go to any zoo, I head straight for the lemurs. Sometimes that’s all I’ll see.
The two lemur exhibits at Artis are completely open, meaning the lemurs are just running around with you. They could jump on your head if they were so inclined. How awesome is that? When I’m hanging out with the lemurs at Artis, I think, as I so often do in Amsterdam, you can’t do this in the States.
What made this last visit to the Artis even better is that I was there with a bunch of other App Makers and their families. Most of us went for dinner and drinks afterwards. It’s fun to go to the zoo, and it’s fun to go out for dinner, but it’s even more fun with a bunch of your friends.
That is what we talk about when we talk about Appsterdam.
