Tag Archives: developers

DeveloperWeek and AppsWorld

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With the amount of time we spend on the road, it is always fun for the San Francisco segment of our team to attend a hometown event, and recently we got two in one week.

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DeveloperWeek was kicked off with a hackathon, and then featured a packed week of speakers, panels, happy hours and other events. Singly co-founder Simon Murtha-Smith gave a tech talk at the event (video below).

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Here’s where we set up camp for both days of AppsWorld

Next was AppsWorld, a conference at Moscone center that drew an international crowd of 5,000 people involved in the app industry, from developers to dev shops to engineering/hosting tools and services to VCs. Our booth was right in the center of the action, and we enjoyed meeting a vast array of people.

Below is Simon’s talk from DeveloperWeek. If you have any questions about it, please email community@singly.com

Venmo: Peer-to-Peer Payments Made Easy

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I could probably name ten payments apps off the top of my head, and every time I attend a hackathon I see a couple more of them pitched. Somehow, the peer-to-peer exchange of money is a challenge nobody has tackled in a user-friendly way — until Venmo.

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Venmo, available on iOS and Android, has made paying your friends charmingly simple. First, select a friend (you can enter a phone number or an email address if your friend doesn’t have Venmo yet). Next, select an amount of money and a message. Then, select either “charge” or “pay,” and you’re done. Your friend will either get notification that you paid her, or a prompt about your charge and the option to pay you back.

As with any peer-to-peer payments platform, a challenge is getting your friends to sign up. Venmo’s UX makes it super easy to get set up, but this is still a challenge – I’ve found that if I owe someone money and pay them on Venmo, they eventually click the link in their email to cash in.

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As you can see above, it took me just a few seconds to send money to my mom. And, you’ll notice that she received the full amount I sent. As long as you connect your bank account (rather than paying by credit card), they charge no fees whatsoever.

If you take my advice and register for Venmo, I’m always accepting payments at austin@singly.com. :)

Now, what’s your favorite app today? Email us at community@singly.com or tweet it out to the world via #singly.

Brewster: How Contacts Should Be

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Good applications do tasks better than humans. Great apps create powerful experiences. Amazing apps transcend the experience and make life better. Brewster is an amazing app.

Before travelling it wouldn’t be extraordinary for me to spend 30+ minutes sitting and thinking about who I should reach out to. I scrolled my phone book contacts, searched facebook or checked which clients were in the city on Linkedin. Always manual, arduous and imperfect. Brewster does it better than I can, makes it fun and fits into my life seamlessly whether I’m looking for personal recommendations, reconnecting with old friends, or impressing a client. Brewster bundles your contacts in a single network that allows you to slice through it intelligently. Taking the contacts out of their silos lets me bring my relationships with me to a more powerful experience.


Three best features:
Updates tells me who I would likely reach out to (new additions or losing touch). Search lets me slice through my contacts for meaningful tags in their social identity. Lists pre-sorts some of those queries.

Browsing the tiled photos I get nostalgic and excited to connect. A completely different experience than thumbing through an alphabetical list. Reconnecting with a high school friend for a comedy show in New York. Meeting with an integration partner for coffee in Colorado. Emailing an ed-tech entrepreneur in Vegas.

A great experience in an app. A great personal experience as a result.

By Daniel Brewster Barber

Full Disclosure – Singly is only affiliated with Brewster through the coincidence that it shares my namesake.

Now, what’s your favorite app today? Email us at community@singly.com or tweet it out to the world via #singly.

Angelhack

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AngelHack is a really big hackathon. Like, really big. This time around, we attended just half of the AngelHack events. We travelled to six cities over two weekends, met 1,200 developers, and saw 64 Singly-powered apps go from idea to demo in 24 hours – and that was just half of the event.

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We were awed and inspired by the brilliant developers we met and the variety, depth and scope of projects we saw around the country these past few weeks, and want to share the stories of the teams we awarded with Singly prizes in each city.

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San Francisco: Pipe

Pipe enables you to manage your team better or be the best team player you can be. By having all the information about what your team is doing, has done and will be doing, you avoid wasting time in update meetings. More over, Pipe keeps you focused, disciplined and empowered. It’s like ‘Fitbit’ for work.IMG_2844

New York City: AddictAid

Sobriety is a struggle. But if we struggletogether, we can struggle better. Addicaid was created to help you connect with other people and stay motivated in any stage of recovery, from the minute you stop using to your millionth day of sobriety. AddictAid’s features are designed to make it easy for you to stay on track by connecting you to individual support, meeting schedules and a variety of other sobriety resources.

Washington, DC: Vocab.be

Studying for the SAT, GRE and other standardized tests is difficult. Vocab.be aims to make it a bit easier through passive learning. As you browse the web, this Chrome extension will replace individual words with synonymous words from the vocab list of the test you’re studying for. Also, it displays uses of those vocab words in the Tweets and Facebook statuses of your friends so that you can associate the words and definitions with your friends.

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Boston: EasyAPI

An awesome platform where anybody, including your cat, can build RESTful APIs in matter of seconds and have endpoints for their backend data. easyAPI makes creating applications simple, easy and fun!

Seattle: ToGetThere

A carpool service that utilizes social services like Facebook and LinkedIn, and discovers your commuting habits with minimal user input.

Los Angeles: HookedUp

A mobile dating app that matches people based on Social Media activity… data from Facebook and Foursquare is calculated to connect you with a date that matches your shared interests. No more need to fill out long questionnaires of your interests to find someone… the matchmaking formula is already waiting in your social media accounts.
Special thanks to the wonderful organizers of AngelHack for making this event great, to our friends at Firebase, Keen.io, Tout and Filepicker.io for providing great developer-focused products and to the 1,200 developers, designers and entreprenuers we had the pleasure to meet over the past couple of weeks around the country.