This weekend join Hack'n Jill, NY Tech Meetup, Pearson, Spotify, Sendgrid, and more for a hackathon focused on social, global, and the greater good.

The event kicks off on Friday night at the Etsy HQ in New York City. Event and ticket information is available here. 

About Hack'n Jill:

We celebrate passionate and committed technology makers.

We believe that diverse teams of men and women create the best solutions.

We will create an environment where both genders feel welcome to build cool things together.

Plug & Play is working the booth and attending EDUCAUSE in Denver, Colorado this week. The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premier gathering for higher education IT professionals.

Pearson attend the Autumn edition of the Hackathon Central series of hackathons, which is themed around the areas of teaching and learning. Despite the cold outside, we find a hackathon that is hot with ideas and execution....

UPDATE: The event has been postponed until January 5, 2013 due to the storm in New York. Give a helping hand to those affected here. 

This Saturday, November 3rd I'll be presenting and participating in the annual Foursquare Hackaton in New York. The focus of this year's global hackathon is around the new developer in-app platform Connected Apps.

I'm looking forward to seeing how developers can utilize Pearson's 8 APIs to create new applications within Foursquare. RSVP now at Hacker League or Meetup and get a head start on our APIshere. The full scheule can be seen here. 

Day two of the amazing Droidcon event featured many more interesting talks on a wide range of topics. Many speakers discussed how they were using Android for more than just mobile phones and tablets... and how diversity, not fragmentation is a key differentiator of the os.

I'm on the way home having listened to some great barcamp talks, such as the one from ProGuard's creator Eric Lafortune. After discussing the much loved obfuscater and optimiser, he went on to talk about a closed source project recently started called DexGuard http://www.saikoa.com/dexguard which also offers to encrypt strings and classes. Exciting stuff if you want to keep the bad guys away.

James Hugman (@jhugman) talked about Kirin, which I first heard of at OTA 2012. It's an interesting approach to building apps since it keeps the UI native but all application / business logic is coded in JavaScript which can also integrate into device native features. This means a large proportion of the app becomes fully portable and leaves the thiner UI and device integration as native code. Take a look at https://github.com/KirinJS for more info.

Last weekend we had the pleasure of attending the Launch48 Weekend at the UCL Engineering Front Building in London. Over 90 people showed up for this bi-annual London-event and over 40 people came loaded with business ideas which they pitched to the audience. A total of 8 ideas were chosen after 2 rounds of voting and 9 ideas were eventually presented on Sunday evening. 

UPDATE: The event has been postponed due to the storm in New York. Give a helping hand to those affected here. 

I'm excited to be one of 60 speakers at next weeks API Strategy & Business Conference in New York! The event is being co-organized by the API Evangelist himself Kin Lane and 3Scale. I will be presenting "Pearson's Developer Platform: One Year and 8 APIs Later" in the Track 1: Media session on Day 1 alongsie NPR and Comcast. Full schedule here.  

Come learn all about the API ecosystem, tickets on sale here.

GetElastic recently wrote an article on Pearson Plug & Play, using our developer program as an example of innovation in digital content. The writer Linda Bustos states that the “Plug and Play developer program uses APIs to make thousands of pieces of content assets acquired over decades available for remixing into new, creative, and interactive products and experiences.”

Read the full article on the GetElastic blog.

Last weeekend the NYC Mayor's Office lead a special edition of the AT&T Hackathon series to focus on combatting truancy and chronic absenteeism among New York City students. The statistics are staggering, over 200,000 (one in five) students missed a month or more of school in NYC last year. For two days developers joined forces in Downtown Manhattan to collaborate on innovative ideas to help solve this growing challenge, beginning on Friday night. 

Leslie Cornfeld (Chair of the Mayor's Interagency Task Force on Truancy, Chronic Absenteeism & School Engagement) provided information and inspiration to participants on Friday night at the start of the event, followed by pitches and initial hacking that concluded at midnight. By Saturday morning most teams had already been formed and hacking kicked further into high gear. 

All teams submitted pitches and demos by 7PM that evening, with demos beginning shortly after. I joined a panel of judges that included Faiza Issa (Assistant Director at New York City Economic Development Corporation), Spondon Dey (Chief Technology Disrupter & Sr Tech Staff Member at AT&T Labs), and fellow sponsors for the difficult task of deciding on the winning applications.