Archive for the ‘Website’ Category
iVolunteer iPhone Teaser
Friday, April 17th, 2009
The crew working on the iVolunteer iPhone app have been hard at work!
We originally wanted to show this demo video during our presentation to the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup, but had a bit of laptop trouble and had to switch things out at the last minute.
It was definitely worth the wait. Kudos to the iPhone team!
Check out the video (btw, it looks awesome in full screen mode) and leave us a note in the comments to let us know what you think.
Why Does iVolunteer Feel Like Startup Weekend?
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
I’ve been to three Startup Weekends and at each one I was newly impressed by the energy that comes from working hard with smart people on something cool. With those events setting the bar so high for me, I have been incredibly pleased by how many times in the past week people have told me how much the first iVolunteer Meetup felt like a Startup Weekend event. That’s high praise in my book.
Hearing that there seem to be some parallels between Startup Weekend and the iVolunteer project got me asking myself some questions:
Why does iVolunteer feel like Startup Weekend?
What can we
swipelearn from the Startup Weekend process?
To get insight on the second question, I’m going to go the source and talk with Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend’s founder and iVolunteer team member. (Check out his post on iVolunteer here: http://andrewhyde.net/ivolunteer-meets-with-a-bang/) I’ll write up my thoughts on that interview soon.
For now, here are my thoughts on the first question: Why does iVolunteer feel like Startup Weekend?
It’s about community.
To steal from David Cohen’s excellent Startup Weened Top 10 post, “Future co-founders will meet, experts will emerge, people will catch the startup bug. This is good for you, and it’s good for your town.” That’s what people have been saying they got from our first Meetup and I can only see that expanding as folks get down to the nitty gritty of getting iVolunteer off the ground.
It’s not about the Benjamins.
Although the air may feel entrepreneurially-enriched, participating in a Startup Weekend isn’t likely to make you wealthy. Neither will working on a guerrilla nonprofit startup. Realizing that nobody is going to make any money with this is actually pretty refreshing. Or, Nicole Glaros put it so aptly, “we don’t need no stinkin’ business model.”
“You decide your level of involvement.”
Structurally, the two endeavors have some common elements. I guess there’s a bit of Project Mayhem built into both. The projects are somewhat loosely defined at the start, then people self-organize into groups who then take on functional areas and tasks they find interesting. Nobody is in charge and people are free to take on as much or as little as they like.
This Tuesday (Feb 3rd), the iVolunteer crew will be giving an update at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. Show your support for the project and see the awesome startup community first hand. Note that our next working session will be on Tuesday (Feb 10th) at Rally Software. More details to come.
iVolunteer Meetup – Tues, Jan 27 5-9pm
Monday, January 26th, 2009
iVolunteer Meetup Location
iVolunteer Meetup
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
5:00pm – 9:00pm
Van Heyst Group Office
719 Walnut St
Boulder, CO [map]
As mentioned at the last New Tech Meetup, iVolunteer’s first working session will be held on Tuesday, January 27. After the closing of RedFish Brewery, the folks at the Van Heyst Group graciously stepped up and offered their space to our efforts. Thank you!
iVolunteer has no employees and is entirely a not-for-profit endeavor. We see the project as a way to support community organizations across the country and also as a showcase for Boulder’s incredible depth of startup talent. We’ll have our laptops out hacking on code for the iPhone app and website, working on marketing plans, writing blog posts, and doing whatever needs doing to make iVolunteer successful.
Equal parts social and working, this is a great opportunity to meet interesting people in the Boulder community and work on something big. Bring your friends and anyone else who might be good to have along for the ride.
RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46562643122
Thanks!
Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)
Rich Grote (@heyrich)
Technology Architecture Picture
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder’s head.
There’s no denying that the iVolunteer project is an ambitious endeavor with a lotta ins and outs and what-have-yous. While much more detail can be found at our github development hub, some folks have been asking for an overview.
Here’s how it all fits together at the 10,000 foot view:
How It All Fits Together
You’re using what???
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
This is the first of many posts on one of the fun parts of working on this project, hacking on it. If this stuff makes no sense to you, but you want to learn, that’s okay! Leave a comment, drop us an email, or, if you’re in the Boulder/Denver area, drop by one of or meetups Tuesday’s 5pm at Redfish.
Part of the fun on a community-created project like this is the ability to stretch your wings and try new things. Yes, we could just slap this thing up with a bunch of boilerplate well-known recipes, but what’s the fun in that? Instead, we’re creating this project using some cool new technology that will be fun to work with. What follows is a quick overview of each piece of the technology stack that we’ll be using on the iVolunteer/ActionFeed project. Although some of it gets a bit technical, hopefully it’ll give you some understanding behind the technology decisions we’re making.
First off is one of the the stars from last years Apple WWDC: Sproutcore. What’s not to love about a javascript MVC framework that lets you build Cocoa-like interfaces? This is the tool set that’s behind Apple’s MobileMe experience. Not only does it use OO javascript, but it also heavily uses observer patterns similar to Cocoa programming (I’ve read, never having developed a Cocoa app). Sproutcore was at 0.9.19 when we started the iVolunteer project, but then the Sproutcore team went for a Halloween Strategy to announce they will rework large sections of it for a 1.0 release. Love being out on the bleeding edge? This is what its like!
Next, both the iPhone App and the ActionFeed website will need REST interfaces from a service in order to get the data to present to the end user. The service will also need to connect to our providers, grab a data set (Please let it be structured!), do any necessary data mapping and throw it into our database (aka ETL). It would also be nice if the service had some administrative interfaces to control the service. There are lots of ways to skin this cat, from the current rage of RoR to writing a cgi, but we wanted to experiment with some cool new stuff coming out of the Java world in Jersey/JAXB/EJB3. Also, if we do end up being successful, running in an app server container should make scaling simpler (in theory).
Of course, the crown jewel of our technology is the iPhone SDK. There are tons of thing to cover on iPhone development. Whether you are an iPhone SDK veterano or just now hoping to get started, we encourage you to come on out, meet some great people, and get your hands dirty working on something cool that’ll help the world.
That wraps up the key technologies we’re using to develop v1.0 of iVolunteer. I’ll dive into each in more detail in upcoming posts. Please comment and let us know if there are things of particular interest so we can start there first.
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