The Android Distraction

I saw this post on O’Reilly Radar and it inspired me to go looking at the list of available Google APIs. There are a lot of them. Google just totally rocks in this regard. I quickly picked one of the many product ideas I have lying about that I’ll never get around to implementing, and tried to figure out how to implement it using a big pile of Google APIs. It would need mobile, so I started with the Android APIs. While looking at those pages I noticed there was a competition closing in 6 days that had some awesome cash prizes. We’re short on cash at the moment so I thought so I thought “can I come up with something we can build in 5 days that will crack the top 50?”. 10 minutes later I had a decent idea, half an hour later I’d fleshed it out enough to decide it was good enough to tempt some developers if I could find some with free time. Problem is most of the people I know who are good are also busy. I started writing letters to a few of them anyway. But next day, by bizarre co-incidence, a friend who had more or less the perfect combination of skills, interests and free time walked into my office, which I don’t think he’s ever visited before. This was sufficiently serendipitous that I figured it was a sign of something that had to be done.

To cut a long story short, Trond, Paul and I are now 4 days into our Android Hack-a-thon and we’ve made some reasonable progress, Particularly Trond who has been going great guns on the UI side of things. We have about 25hrs to go. Can we complete an app that will crack the top 50? Remains to be seen.

Part of me feels guilty because Interclue requires my full focus at least until we get to break-even on cashflow (which we’re not even close to on donations alone…), but I could see there was an overlap in the technologies we would need for the Android project and those we will be using for the subscriber extensions to Interclue, and although I come up with new product ideas pretty often, this is the first time I’ve allowed myself to get past the “idea” phase on a new one for over two years, and there is a definite cutoff point (30 hours away now) where my attention can switch back to Interclue, which I have been keeping half an eye on in any case. So I decided I could risk it just this once. I promise not to make a habit of it!

BTW there is some particularly awesome news about Interclue that I haven’t formally announced yet. Will do so soon. Let’s just say that it’s going great and I’ve got no intention of sidelining it in favor of a new venture in Android Application Development, but if we do win one of the 50 $25k prizes then I’ll have to at least give this at least enough attention through June 30th to have a crack at the $275k and $100k prizes, and based on the experience gained “Interclue for Android” will be looking good for the next $5m challenge contest happening later in the year!

PS: Rob O’Brien and Marek Kuziel, who were both sadly too overloaded with stuff to give me a hand with this, are organizing a Mobile and Identity Barcamp in Wellington near the end of the month. Go if you can, I’m sure it will be awesome.