8 Aug, 2008
Last weekend (Friday and Saturday), I attended RubyNation 2008, the first regional Ruby conference in my area. The speakers were excellent and it was great to meet up with folks from the Ruby community who I haven’t seen in awhile. As always, I left feeling energized and excited about my Ruby projects.
There were two main themes of the conference: the ‘official’ one was Ceremony vs. Essence, while the ‘unofficial’ one was Test all the fucking time. The first theme was the subject of the opening and closing keynotes. The second came from Bryan Liles lighting talk on the first day and kept coming up afterwards (audience ‘hecklers’ would ask presenters how often they should test).
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6 Aug, 2008
Over on TechCrunch they have a great overview of the first nine startups to come out of LaunchBox Digital, a local early stage investment firm. One of the founders of ShareMeme, Luc Castera, from the Ruby Users’ Group (and local conferences). I’m excited to dig-in and start using these new services. Here’s a brief overview:
- BuzzHubb: A Better College Social Network. Next generation group management for colleges and universities (it is similar to Facebook in that regard &emdash only students can join).
- Heekya: The Wikipedia For Stories. Social story telling using multiple forms of media (text, photos, video).
- JamLegend: Guitar Hero Goes Social. A free online music gaming experience.
- Koofers: Crib Notes For Picking College Classes. A tool to help students build their class schedules with insight into the classes, teachers, and styles as reported by other students. It also provides access to study guides, past exams, etc. to assist students.
Mpowerplayer: Marketing Mobile Games On Facebook. Play mobile versions of games on your computer, to try before you buy.
- MyGameMug: Match.com For Gamers. A personality test for gamers &emdash find others who like the kinds of games that you do.
- Razume: Resume 2.0. A tool for young (21-35) job seekers. This looks really interesting to me because I had a similar idea several years ago but never executed on it. I’m curious to see how its features overlap with my detailed plan.
- ShareMeme: Evite Meets Twitter. This service is addressing a real issue that is affecting me: being (inadvertently) spammed by my friends as they sign up for social networks and other services. If it succeeds it can be the go to point for distributing information out to your friends and family through the best channels.
- Zadby: Web Video Product Placement. Zadby wants to be the market maker for product placement in web video, through its network of independent web video producers.
