TechCrunch Hackathon London 2016

It was an intense weekend, from 12:30 Saturday to 09:30 on Sunday New Seed participated in the TechCrunch Hackathon in London. It was for the third year in a row that New Seed participated in the competition where you should build a new product from scratch in about 24 hours.

This year New Seed built an app for creating augmented reality (AR) memories. The app works as a digital version of a padlock on a bridge or message in a bottle. You leave a message right where you are standing. For someone else to read it they have to come to the same spot. All memories are represented as stars in augmented reality.

Magnus Lindgren describes one of the use cases:

I have two young daughters at home. As I travel the world I think of them a lot. I want to leave “memory bottles” behind with memories. Years later when my daughters travel on their own, they can find these memories and feel a connection to me. Instant messages are instantly forgotten. This is the opposite.

We are proud of our contribution, but it was tough working for such a long time without sleeping. The presentation also went well, especially considering sleep deprivation, hard work and nervousness for presenting something in just 60 seconds! You can see the video in the old live feed below, our contribution starts at 58:15.

Our contribution to the hackathon won us tickets to the TechCrunch Disrupt that starts today in London.

TechCrunch Hackathon 2015

New Seed participated in TechCrunch Hackathon 2015 in London the 5-6 of December. The rules where simple: create a whole new product in about 20 hours, all code must be written during the competition.

From New Seed we where a four member team who worked hard the whole night with our idea: OverDriveJS. OverDriveJS is a platform for distributing JavaScript directly to the end users. Normaly JavaScript is only used by webmasters or other developers. OverDriveJS enables user to decide which programs to load on the pages they visit rather than leaving that decision up to the webmasters. The user can for example load social media widgets or tools for displaying images in a gallery on a page.

The winner of TechCrunch Hackathon 2015 in London was the service FreeMe. The contribution from New Seed only won ticktets to entry to the main conference which was held the days following the Hackathon.

It was very interesting to compete and see what we could deliver in so short amount of time. We where impressed by our own contribution and it is already working as a fully functional service. Feel free to try OverDriveJS out on the pages you visit, you will find instructions of how to load it on OverDriveJS’s homepage.

New Seed at Øredev

For the past 11 years Øredev have organized a developer conference in Malmö. This year over 150 presentations where held over three days. New Seed attended Øredev and experienced lectures on everything from animations, database design to security and new technologies.

Val Head lectured about animation in different situations. What we especially took away from this is how to create meaningful animations to communicate the message you want to convey. By making use of Disney’s twelve basic principles of animation one can create movements that feel natural and vivid. The reason it is good to know these principles is that in addition to the creation of the animation you also get a common vocabulary to describe it with. Val Head also addressed how to apply animations for mobile devices where space is limited and where “ordinary” animations do not fit.

http://valhead.com/

Aaron Gustafson talked about how to use new technologies when developing web interface while meeting users with older browsers. Through simple tips and tricks, everything can be backwards compatible, while you do not need to limit yourself. This can help New Seeds customers to reach more users who, for various reasons, do not support the latest technology.

https://aaron-gustafson.com/

Martin Kleppmann has worked at LinkedIn but is now a researcher at Cambridge. He described a new way to distribute databases by creating streams of data that subsystems can listen to and create indexes, caching and replication. This structure is suitable for systems with a lot of data and traffic. Using these concepts, we at New Seed are able to build scalable and maintainable databases.

https://martin.kleppmann.com/

Oren Eini described how NoSQL can be used to reduce the number of database calls and provide better performance in comparison with traditional relational databases. He showed by example how to design databases NoSQL in a beneficial way to avoid corruption of data. Moreover, he demonstrated how advanced queries in SQL can be performed more easily and with greater time efficiency using Map / Reduce functions.

This and much more we at New Seed learned during these three days. We have received a lot of inspiration and ideas for the future and look forward to using our new-found knowledge in the systems we build for our customers.

Elobina is hiring

Our partner Elobina now looking for a web developer to help us to the next stage of development. New Seed has long supported Elobinas development and has been involved in producing their entire platform for on-demand production of unique and ecological fabric products.

Elobina have a very exciting future ahead and this we hope is the beginning of something big. We will start a textile revolution where everyone can create their own unique products. Currently there are two positions that we are in need of. You will also work closely with the New Seed’s team of experienced consultants.

WordPress developer:
Can you code PHP and WordPress to look and act exactly as you want? Elobina needs a web developer to help them with their own as well as partners websites. Development of themes (after the model of the designer) and plug-ins will be your main occupation.

JavaScript / Frontend:
Have you read “JavaScript: The Good Parts” and can know HTML5 like the back of your hand? Do you like to code JavaScript with a focus on interaction with other services (such as social media) and interaction with the users? Then you can join and help us make a world class product editor!

Go to Elobina directly or contact us at New Seed! We hope to hear from you!

A donation to UNHCR

They say that not since the second world war have so many refugees in the world. We are constantly being fed with horrible images and even worse stories of what is happening around us. There must be something we can do.

We at New Seed have chosen to donate 5000 SEK to UNHCR to support their efforts. We hope this gift will help some of the people on the run. Even if this may be a large sum of money for us to donate it is disconsolately small considering the need. We hope that our action will inspire others to do the same and contribute to organisations like UNHCR.

UNHCR encourages private persons to donate 255 SEK for a rescue package for someone in need. Most of us can afford such a contribution.

Today is friday. Let’s start the weekend with a good dead, donate money to the refugee catastrophe!

The image is from UNHCR, source.