Seo Master present to you: The Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (GTUG) held the first GTUG Campout, a 46 hour hackathon, over the weekend of August 7-9. Nearly 200 developers, designers, and business people came to build working applications using Google Technology, focusing largely on the Google Wave API.
The event was intense, spanning 3 days. In that time, attendees had to pitch ideas, form teams, and code like heck to have a working prototype to demo by Sunday evening.
Friday evening, we had over 50 pitches. Afterwards, people had a chance to mingle and find teams that they wanted to work with. Groups whiteboarded and discussed their ideas, then started working hard. Over 30 coders were still working past 2:00 am Saturday morning.
Sunday night we had 32 presentations of working applications followed by wooden nickel style voting to determine the winner. The crowd chose Videowave, a Wave gadget that allows synchronized viewing of videos from YouTube. They were awarded 1 pass to Google I/O '10, 2 G1 phones, and lunch with members of the Wave team.
Screenshot of Videowave in action
The list of winners:
1st place: Videowave, by Solomon Wu, Aaron Tong, Nelson To. (their blog)
PoppyWave, by Hitesh Parashar, Van Riper, Kewaljit, David Elliston, Dave Lyman, Prathap Nimal, Dave Neubaur, Toby Morning, Perrine Crampton
Wave-Email Gateway that lets non-Wave users to participate in Wave.
Robot: poppywave@appspot.com
BeerTime Bot, by Jason Katzer, Aaditiya Bhatia, Joe Mulvaney
Measures hostility level in a Wave. If too high, hijacks thread and geolocates participants and suggests nearby drinking establishment. Robot and gadget components.
Congratulations to all the winners and other attendees who worked so hard! Thanks also to the Googlers who helped out and answered questions, and our volunteers, especially those that helped with videos and photos.
A fun slideshow of the event:
The Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group is one of the first GTUGs around the world. Today around 70 GTUGs exist worldwide. Information about starting a GTUG in your area can be found at http://www.gtugs.org. The first GTUG Campout was a great success and we are looking forward to doing the event next year, and hope other GTUGs will host GTUG Campouts in their neighborhoods.
Update: Video and some images courtesy of Shirley Lin of WooMeOver.
By Kevin Nilson, co-leader of the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: My favorite part about Google I/O is the dozens of interesting conversations with developers -- getting a first-hand look at the different things that they are doing with our technologies. That's the spirit of the Google Technology User Groups -- regular meetups where local developers can get together to network and discuss, demo, and hack on Google's many developer offerings.
From lightning talks in Mountain View, to App Engine hackathons in Tokyo, to lectures in Berlin, the GTUGs are a great place to meet fellow developers and learn (or teach) something new.
At Google I/O, there were many folks eager to bring the spirit of the conference back to their hometowns by starting up GTUGs of their own. Since the conference ended, our list of current GTUGs has grown to include this 'baby boomer' generation of chapters. The following are all new groups looking for members and starting to set up their first events.