February 2014 Android Meetup – Android and Devices

A very wise developer once said, “Coding is fun, but sandwiches are better.” Thanks to Google and our amazing speakers at our “Android and Devices” meetup Wednesday, we had bits of both. Early birds started arriving around 6pm and helped themselves to an impressive array of sandwiches, chips and brownies.

While everyone mingled, I went around giving out raffle tickets for two Spheros, robotic gaming balls that you connect and control with your phone or tablet. To kick off the meetup, Kevin welcomed the group with a warm (and as usual, comedic) intro. For our avid tweeters, he shared our new meetup Twitter account, @NYAndroidMeetup and our hashtag #androidnyc. He also introduced me! If you have questions or suggestions about meetup logistics, please let me know – we’re always looking for people to present and new topics.

David Haddad, Founder/CEO of Open mHealth was our first speaker and talked about why open software architecture is needed to make sense of the array of data coming from health apps and devices. He showed a real-life example of a patient who had post-traumatic stress disorder. A health app showed his decreased texting activity to his wife and helped doctors realize that he was becoming more distant as a result of PTSD.

Inder Singh, Founder/CEO of Kinsa Health demonstrated the Kinsa thermometer on an Android device with his marketing guru Erin Koehler. They aim to map the spread of diseases in real-time with their smart thermometer, while keeping it fun and comfortable for kids. Inder also discussed the pros of working with Android, such as being able to use the audio jack for input/out simultaneously – something you can’t do on iOS.

Izzy Johnston, Lead Android Developer at Quirky bravely took the stage without a PowerPoint presentation, but she didn’t need it! She talked about Quirky’s mission to bring new inventions into the market through voting from their online community and their own product design team. She also connected her Pebble watch via bluetooth and switched on a lightbulb nearby!

Last but not least, Dario Laverde, Developer Evangelist, gave his intro talk about working with the Glass API and what’s in store. He also showed the array of functions that Glass is capable of, including “read my mind” and “play a game.”

Our curious audience had many questions about the various devices after – I’m glad our presentations didn’t run over so we had time for all of them! Izzy then helped us select two lucky winners of the Spheros. Before the night ended, we wanted to try a new thing we learned from Larry Legend from the NY iOS Developer meetup. We gave developers a chance to talk about any open source projects they’re working on, connect with job leads, etc. Kevin then thanked everyone for coming, and a few energetic meetup attendees joined our Touchlab team for drinks at 675 bar afterwards.

Thanks to Roman at Google for coordinating, and to our speakers!

Save the dates for our upcoming meetups:

• March 12 at Tumblr – The topic is Design
• April 16 at StackExchange with Mark Murphy, who will talk about the next billion Android users

See you in March,
Olivia
Operations, Touchlab
Co-organizer, NY Android Developers Meetup