wejustblog

I start by apologising to everyone for not writing since the day we were preparing for the Broadcast Asia 2008 exhibition. I told myself that if we were going to have a blog, we should blog. It shouldn’t be a press release site. It shouldn’t be an announcement page. It should be about engagement. Well, I’ll try to make amends from now on. If I’m screwing up, feel free to drop me an email to let me know.

So here goes.

I’m glad to say that since BroadcastAsia, we’ve completed building the Widgeous core - that means to say it can stand on it’s now although we will keep improving it and I’m sure we will learn of it’s limitations as we proceed to scale. From there, we’ve moved towards wanting to attract developers to start building applications on our platform.

In that respect, we recently went over to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to be part of their inaugural Barcamp(which I have to say, was friggin awesome!) If there’s anything I took away from that session it must be the fact that the culture of sharing knowledge coupled with a sense of dissatisfaction is critical to innovation. We left KL with a sense of excitement that we would be going back to continue work on Widgeous and yet with a certain sadness that it would be some time before we see the next Barcamp Malaysia happen.

And since we’ve come back, we’ve had to think about solving our next set of problems - how to gain traction? You see, we’ve always had a chicken and egg problem, We need the users and the developers - but we’ve always needed them both at the same time. That is so not going to happen. And so we shifted our focus on trying to get the developers on board first but still, that’s not working. We sat and we figured:

1. People don’t entirely understand what we do.
2. People don’t have a real example of what the Widgeous Platform can do(this is made worse by [1] ).
3. People don’t have time to explore…and we haven’t really made that process much easier.

So we made a few decisions. Amongst those:-

1. We’re going to spend more time creating real in-house applications. Some of which will released in the coming weeks. This will aimed at providing both a case study and an experience for users.
2. We’re going to provide a more dedicated area for developers to find out about how they can be part of our system and guide them into learning how to use our APIs.
3. We’re going to provide a more friendly channel for communication with you - mainly a forum.
4. We’re going to provide a place on Widgeous for non-developers to actually do useful stuff and slowly get introduced to our work.

If all goes well, we’ll make our first release tomorrow afternoon…Just need to check some things with the rest of the team when I get into the office tomorrow morning.

I’m also thinking of meeting up(either online or offline) in small groups just to get feedback on some of our internal product development plans/products that are in development now. Coffee joints probably work offline but do you know what online tool( or collection of tools) are good for having online demos & discussion? Anyone interested?

Broadcast Asia is tomorrow and we’re here setting up the equipment… I’ve never been inside the setting up area of such a huge scale event before and it’s quite an eye opener.

It’s just amazing how so many people can set up like 8 entire halls worth of stuff in like…48 hours?

Ok. Ok. Let’s just let the pictures do the talking…

Ridz gets really excited looking at what’s on screen…

 
Last minute set up. All systems go? Almost.

Remember the game? Here are some screenshots.

Ok. Back to ‘trying’ to work…See ya there~!

Thanks to Michael and the PHP User Group for putting up the video

I thought it was pretty redundant to have to open up my MSN or to go all the way to the Widgeous page just to try to do a simple translation. Why can’t I just have the Widgeous Device pop up as and when I needed it. So thanks to Aen’s initial javascript hack and some further alterations from yours truly, now you can!

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar

Now when you click the bookmarklet, the Widgeous device will popup in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Click it again and it goes away!

I have to say though that this is something we did as a “hack” and so we haven’t tested it. So far I know it works well only on Firefox.

Hope it helps!

I figured I should write something about our upcoming participation in the event…

An event hosted by the Singapore Media Development Authority (MDA), Broadcast Asia 2008 will be held from the 17^th to 20^th June 2008 and we’ll be showcasing some of our stuff at the MDA Jewel Showcase Area.

The event draws broadcasters, production companies, animation houses, content owners and developers, computer graphics producers, online gaming developers and many more. It’s an interesting challenge for us to see how Widgeous can contribute to this industry because we’re such a fundamental technology (As in we’re a platform and so we’re focusing on the front-end).

So how is our presentation going to be different from our previous one at BarCamp? Well, the crowd is different. While Barcamp focused on developers, Broadcast Asia 2008 draws a totally different type audience. For one, I wonder how many people are actually even aware of the evolution of web technologies.

I suspect it’s going to be crucial for us to show how we can actually allow for great interaction between content providers (or their content itself) and their consumers. So what better way than to showcase how a simple technology like ours can increase game participation right? It’ll be participative. It’ll be entertaining. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be completely addictive.

So yeah, other than the usual presentation and press kits that we’ll be passing around, we’ve decided to develop a simple text-focused game that will allow developers to see how Widgeous can make their games more portable. And as for the users, well, it’ll show you how you can play a game regardless of where you are.

What do you think of the approach?

Ok, I know you guys probably want to know more about the game itself but that’s something you’ll have to find out by going down for BCA. We’ll probably only release it on that day itself. =)