Updated: video added with background on BlueVia ahead of Monday’s event

Interested in developing for WebOS? Want to learn how you can monetise your App using BlueVia API’s? Want to see the HP TouchPad in the UK before anyone else? Want to meet other WebOS developers based in UK & Europe?

If you’ve answered yes, what are you waiting for, sign up now for Monday’s event.

We’ll have WebOS and BlueVia engineers hosting live coding sessions to help you get the best out of Enyo and BlueVia API’s. The event is being hosted at the TechHub located in the heart of London’s Silicon Roundabout.

This is the first of hopefully many BlueVia – WebOS Hack events however as we only have a few hours speed is the name of the game for this event, you need to arrive ready to code:

Prerequisites for the event:

1. Download, install and configure the WebOS 3.0 SD
2. Register on BlueVia.com
3. Read the documentation and sample code on BlueVia.com

Event details:

Monday, July 11 2011 - 6:30 – 9:30 PM
TechHub
Ground Floor 76-80 City Rd
EC1Y 2BJ
London
United Kingdom

For more information check out http://blueviawebos.eventbrite.com/

The BlueVia team travelled to the USA in June 2011 for The Muther! of all Hackathons. Here’s Tom’s account of their west coast trip:

Having left an unsurprisingly cold and dank England behind us we were all pleasantly relieved to find San Francisco a lovely 27c.  Grabbing our bags we made our way to the hotel and started our next challenge, staying awake. I had been up since 4am, had an eleven hour flight and had landed at 3pm PDT, it was going to be a long day.

But hey, we’re in the USA and get to talk shop with a whole range of developers and companies, so we really can’t complain After being awake for 25 hours straight, we all finally succumbed to the much-needed desire for sleep.

Nick and Andres chat at HP's HQ

Wednesday brought our first meeting on US soil, as we headed off on the CalTran to Sunnyvale to visit John Kneeland at HP WebOS HQ to discuss their new TouchPad and potential joint Hackathons in the UK (Stay tuned folks!).

On the social side, we watched the Giants cream Minnesota at the AT&T Park.

Even the baseball was mobile-themed

Thursday rolls around and we’re starting to deal with the jet lag slightly better and we are off to visit Janine Yoong at TokBox a video streaming company who are interested in integrating their services into BlueVia. They offer a strong video streaming platform that looks like it will be a good candidate for a BlueVia video API.

In the afternoon, Nick convinced us that jet lag, bicycles and the wrong side of the road were a real good combo, so $114 later the three of us had bikes and a map. My fears were unfounded and I’m glad we did it as 15k later we had taken in a large part of the bay area and the cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge. We stopped at Sausalito for a tea break and to grab the ferry back home.

Friday arrived and with it the start of the WIP Muther of all Hackathons. Our first task was to deliver a Masterclass on BlueVia, how it can benefit developers and provide the tools and business models to access the criminally under served Latin America Market. Even though it was at 9am, which is hardly the most civilised of times for developers we got a modest turn out of 10.

Regardless of the time, our session progressed well: I discussed the need to monitise products and how BlueVia can help generate revenue, Nick discussed the API’s in more detail and our good friend Marsh from Apigee presented their new console that integrates. The session finished, I left Nick to discuss some of the more technical questions from developers and rushed to the main hall to deliver my Tool Pitch.

The Tool Pitch is for sponsors to talk about their API’s and make developers aware of the competition. The core of my pitch was centred on how developers need to think about alternative revenue streams and making them aware of the big wide world out there, specifically Latin America.

Audience at WIP's Muther of all Hackathons

It’s an important message, due to the fact that the big two mobile operating systems do not have an App store available to the Latin American market. That means two things, one that users are being criminally underserved by their mobile devices and two that there is a monumental opportunity for developers to access that market and set up an ecosystem of their own before the giants arrive.

As the clock stuck 12, the hacking officially began, the next 12 hours passed in a blur of technical support, marketing and talk of future possibilities. Red bull cans were located, drunk and crushed in an attempt to stave off sleep (A special mention goes to Nick for helping developers start new projects at 2am!).

We had long since missed the last train back to the city, so we all booked into the nearest hotel and crashed out. Waking at 7am after 4 hours slee, we were looking forward to returning to the venue to see what our developers had come up with.

Wearing yesterday’s clothes we shuffled out of the hotel, shading our eyes from the sun and grabbed the nearest cab to the Computer History Museum. It may be a tad hyperbolic but the museum the morning after the night before was akin to a zombie film. Baggy eyed developers, shuffled to various sources of caffeine and sugar and return to their desks, with nary a word. These final hours would separate the wheat from the chaff, we resumed our places at our Expert table and soon began to field questions from developers.

Time moved on and we soon hit 12pm, the deadline for Apps to be submitted and code to be finalised. Now began the most important part of the event, the pitches.

Developers had 3 minutes to sell their App and the previous 12 hours will have been for nothing if they could not get their point across. A good app can be destroyed by a poor or confusing pitch, we the judges had 3 minutes to assess the App, its purpose, innovation, marketability and overall quality. Sadly some of the teams had not heeded the advice in the previous days panel and failed to either prepare a solid pitch or selected the wrong person to present to the detriment of their product.

So what were are prizes and more importantly who won them?

• 1^st prize = Alert4U
  Prize: $5000 in seed fund money to bring the App to market.
  A beautifully simple app featuring a textbox and two buttons. If you’re in a dangerous place or situation e.g. walking home alone from the pub, elderly and having a shower, you set an alarm. This creates two alerts, on cloud and one SMS, if you don’t cancel the alarm before the time limit expires it sends a alert message to three nominated contacts telling you your last location and what you were doing.
• 2^nd = RescueMe
  Prize: $1250 in seed fund money.
  This disaster relief App is designed to help users trapped during an earthquake or similar natural disaster. It has a lovely UI and a HUGE red button that will send out a SMS with a message and location information to nominated contacts, it also features speech recognition allow dictation of message.
• 3^rd = TapShake Messenger
  Prize: $1250 in seed fund money.
  This App blew me away, it uses haptics to help users with a visual impairment input braille SMS messages. It has great reach beyond just messaging as it could easily be inserted as a new input mechanism for users to interact with mobile devices.

Three different types of Apps, but all using our API’s in innovative ways, all in all I couldn’t be happier about our American road trip.