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.
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.
When we announced we were expanding Appsterdam to Delft, many people exclaimed with glee, but some people responded with confusion—and concern that we were diluting or diverging from the mission of Appsterdam. Haven’t I, myself, said, on this very blog, that location matters, and that the best location is Amsterdam?
Indeed, but you have to look at the bigger picture. We have made Amsterdam the best place in the world for App Makers, because we want App Makers to come to Amsterdam, because we want to bring App Makers together.
In a perfect world every App Maker in the world would live in Amsterdam, and we’d all be together all the time. In the real world, a lot of people can’t make it to Amsterdam just yet, but we can still help them in their careers, thereby instilling in them our values—chief among them the benefit of getting together with other App Makers.
This is what it means to be a center of gravity. We want people to come here, entice people to come here, and help people to come here. But more than that we want people to look to Appsterdam—for help, for guidance, for culture. We want to be the first name, and the last word, in apps.
Outside of the Netherlands, our facilities will be called Appsterdam Embassies, because they are exactly that—a little piece of Appsterdam in another city. What better way to show people what we are all about, and in doing so entice them to join us in the City of Apps?
Inside the Netherlands is where we have always drawn our borders, because it’s easy enough to get around inside this tiny country that even someone in Maastricht can make it up to Amsterdam for an Appsterdam Family Weekend once in a while. Moreover, for most of the world, Amsterdam is the Netherlands.
I know a lot of people resent that, but it is what it is. Amsterdam is a powerful brand, which is one of the reasons we chose it as our home. But we are not in the business of building walls, nor of excluding people. We are building Appsterdam not as a fortress of solitude, but as the capital for a unified world of App Makers.
Given our goal of serving all the world’s App Makers, the things Appsterdam builds are not intended to be exclusive to Amsterdam, but to duplicated in cities all over the world, franchised by other passionate people who share our vision of building community, encouraging unity, and fostering collaboration.
This is why it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first Appland location, Appsterdam Delft. Delft is a great location for Appsterdam, not just because it’s convenient to people in South Holland, but because it is home to Technische Universiteit Delft, the oldest and largest technical university in the Netherlands, sometimes called the Dutch MIT.
It’s also a lovely town with a rich history, not unlike Amsterdam. We’re kicking things off there just like we did here, with a Meeten en Drinken, this Wednesday (July 27) at 19:00 at:
While we’ll be having our regular Meeten en Drinken at Cafe Bax in Amsterdam at the same time, I and several other Appsterdammers will be in Delft to help kick things off, pass out stickers, and talk about the future of Appsterdam in Delft.
In addition to the evening’s festivities, innovative ICT company and incubator SPING is offering its Grand Cafe to App Makers for the day. Meet your colleagues and spend a couple of hours working beside them. SPING is providing WiFi, coffee, tea and lunch.
