The Amazon Web Services crew are back on the road with their AWS Startup Tour, and Brad Hintze and I will be joining them tomorrow in Salt Lake City.

I’ll make a brief presentation around 3:30-ish, speaking about Bungee Connect and how Bungee Labs use Amazon Web Services. So if you’re in the area, please swing by to give Brad and me a hello.

On June 9th, David Berlind is hosting an interesting opportunity to discuss the impact the cloud is having on business applications from both a cloud-based service provider and customer perspective. Brad Hintze, Lyle Ball and Dave Mitchell will be representing Bungee with a table at the event demonstrating Bungee Connect and some of the applications that have been built with Bungee. Evening in the Cloud is a free event, register here.

The Bungee team will also hang around for Enterprise 2.0 June 10th-12th.

If you are going to be in the Boston area and would like to meet up with us leave us a comment.

-Brad

In addition to the Bungee Connect 101 Webcast for developers working on the Start Tab tutorials (or those that recently completed them), we’re adding a new Bungee Connect 201 for developers who have moved beyond the Start Tab contents, starting on June 4th.

We have plans for a series of more advanced Bungee Connect Webcasts to follow 201, so be sure and get through these concepts now so you are ready when they roll out!

If you are find yourself getting stuck in your development, bring your questions to the webcast!

Bungee Connect 101 Webcast covers:

• Application building blocks: classes, fields, function, forms, etc.
• What does “model driven” mean and how it helps you build app in Bungee Connect
• Walk through of a small application
  o How is the model connected to the view: Model-View-Adapter model
  o How do the components interact
  o How inheritance can simplify your app
• A chance to ask any questions you have about the Start Tab, building apps in Bungee Connect or any other burning questions!

Register here for Bungee Connect 101 next week on 28 May at 2pm MT

Register here for Bungee Connect 101 in TWO weeks on 4 June at 9am MT

The new Bungee Connect 201 Webcast will cover

• What is an Adapter and what are the different types of Adapters
• What is a Connection
• How do you use Adapters and Connections with controls such as
  o FormList
  o DynamicForm
  o MultiColumnList
• A chance to ask any questions you have about the Start Tab, building apps in Bungee Connect or any other burning questions!

Register here for Bungee Connect 201 Webcast on 4 June at 2pm MT

Check back on the blog for news about future webcast topics!

Amy Ballard, Community Program Manager

Morning Session: 9:00 – 10:00 am MDT 

Register for the morning event to attend

Afternoon Session: 2:00 – 3:00 pm MDT 

Register for the afternoon event to attend

Have you finished the 3 Start Tab tutorials, or close to finishing these? We would like to invite you to a new learning program for developers new to Bungee Connect.

We now have two live webcasts to choose from: one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Both webcasts will cover the same content so, select the time that works best for you.

Bungee Connect’s 101 “live” Webcast will focus on:

• Application building blocks: classes, fields, function, forms, etc.
• What does “model driven” mean and how it helps you build app in Bungee Connect
• Walk through of a small application
  • How is the model connected to the view: Model-View-Adapter model
  • How do the components interact
  • How inheritance can simplify your app
• A chance to ask any questions you have about the Start Tab, building apps in Bungee Connect or any other burning questions!

If you haven’t completed the 3 Start Tab tutorials, please spend some time checking them out before attending this webcast! We’re looking forward to getting to know you and discover what you want to do with Bungee Connect.

Amy Ballard, Community Program Manager

While at Web 2.0 Expo, Jesse Stay interviewed me and Corey Olsen about Bungee Connect. He just updated his blog with some video of the demo we gave him.

Tonight we will be hosting the Social Media Developers Garage. At the event tonight, Ted Haeger and I will be providing a Hello World introduction to using Bungee Connect with a few services like Facebook, Twitter and possibly even Google Contacts.

-Brad

-Brad

Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm MDT

Register for the event to attend

Have you finished the 3 Start Tab tutorial, or close finishing these? We would like to invite you to a new learning program for developers new to Bungee Connect.

Bungee Connect’s 101 “live” Webcast will focus on:

• Application building blocks: classes, fields, function, forms, etc.
• What does “model driven” mean and how it helps you build app in Bungee Connect
• Walk through of a small application
  • How is the model connected to the view: Model-View-Adapter model
  • How do the components interact
  • How inheritance can simplify your app
• A chance to ask any questions you have about the Start Tab, building apps in Bungee Connect or any other burning questions!

If you haven’t completed the 3 Start Tab tutorials, please spend some time checking them out before attending this webcast! We’re looking forward to getting to know you and discover what you want to do with Bungee Connect.

Amy Ballard, Community Program Manager

eBay Developers Conference

Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger will be at the eBay Developer Conference on June 16-18th in Chicago. We are leading a session on “Building your app, not shaving the yak”. Should be a fun discussion on how to remove the stuff that doesn’t add any value to the applications you are building.

We’ll post an update once the session time has been announced. If you would like to meet while we are out there please drop us a line at brad [at] bungeelabs [dot] com or ted [at] bungeelabs [dot] com.

–Brad

May 4 & 5, 2008, Moscone South, San Franciso, CA

Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger will be at Startup Camp this coming Sunday and Monday. We intend to lead one or more discussions on how entrepreneurs can use hosted platforms (Platform as a Service) as a springboard for proving out their product/service ideas.

Sunday evening, we present on the main stage. Then, if there is interest, we may a lead hand-ons developer session as an unconference session.

If you’d like us to cover anything specific, or to participate in a session that you are leading, please drop us a comment and let us know.

–Ted

The Jump Cast provides BCDN Developers with an opportunity to talk directly with the Bungee team, and ask questions about Bungee Connect.

Agenda for this Jump Call:

1. What’s Next? Product Manager Dave Brooksby tells what’s planned for the next update
2. Presentation: The new “Learn tab” project
3. Open Q&A

Register for the event to attend.

• Twitter is integrated and performing adequately.
• Google Contacts is integrated, but we have not been able to fix a blocker bug. (I blame it on lack of sleep.)
• Oauth is working, but the undocumented MySpace REST API has hung us up at every turn.
• The main architecture is complete, and seems to work.
• The main form, while not beautiful yet, is working.
• Our detail form for the Google Contact type works.

So all in all, we got close, but we have not deployed a new version because the “show it live” part isn’t ready.

We hope to have something live tomorrow…after some sleep. Here’s a screenshot of what we have at the moment (click to embiggen):

…but it ain’t much.

We have a placeholder page that you can now watch for updates.

As my colleague Brad Hintze recently posted, Bungee Labs is hosting a hackathon event for Utah Social Media Developer Garage, and three of us from Bungee Labs will be hacking together a social mashup of our own using Bungee Connect.

We start with no code, three developers, four APIs, and less than 4 hours to make something interesting.

Something Interesting
Our current plan is to create a tool that lets you manage traditional contact information–names, phones, addresses–with social media contact information–blogs, social site info–all mashed together in a useful utility. It would allow you to make associations between your different contacts, linking them together, as well as use your contact information to find people in various social sites. By the end of the night, we hope to have at least an extensible proof-of-concept application deployed live to the web. Update: Alex just added a YouTube video of me talking some more specifics of the plan.

Four API’s
The API’s we’re going with tonight are a starter set, but we’re architecting the app so that we can extend it with additional services as easily as possible.

• We’re starting with Google Contacts (think: Gmail contacts) as the first contact list to incorporate.
• We’re using Twitter as the first blog source to incorporate.
• Since tonight’s hackathon is based on Open Social, we’re bringing in MySpace. (Why MySpace? Well, they’re the only provider of a REST implementation of Open Social. Kudos to MySpace for that one. Now some documentation on that API wouldn’t hurt.)
• Finally, the fourth API is Oauth, which is necessary for using MySpace’s Open Social implementation.

Three Developers

• Amy Ballard, an experienced developer who now works as a program manager for Bungee Connect Developer Network
• Brad Hintze, Bungee Labs’ Director of Technical Marketing, who fakes being a developer really well
• Ted Haeger (a.k.a. “yours truly”), Director of Bungee Connect Developer Network, and who fakes being a developer rather poorly.

No Code
We have met a couple times–not nearly enough–to put together some preliminary plans for what we might make, but we have not started writing any of the code for this project yet. Full disclosure: we did create general-purpose Bungee Connect libraries for our APIs. (These libraries are now in the list of importable example code for Bungee Connect, under a BSD-style license.) We thought that having these libraries a necessary step, since most of the hackers coming tonight will have ready access to Javascript libraries for each of the APIs that we’re using. So, if that’s not technically “no code,” then I hope you’ll give us a pass for being honest.

Update: Alex YouTubed a short video of me talking about our mashup plan:

Stay tuned for more updates throughout the evening, including an evolving URL for our live application.

–Ted
Ted Haeger
Director, BCDN

At the event Ted Haeger, Amy Ballard and Brad Hintze will be hacking together an application from several different APIs using Bungee Connect. We’re throwing around a couple ideas of what to build, if you have an idea for an app you would like to see using Open Social and other APIs contact Brad [ brad AT bungeelabs DOT com] or Ted . We’re likely going to be using the Twitter, Facebook, and Google Contacts among other APIs. We’ll share more details here and at the event.

A couple of Bungee Labs engineers will also be on hand if you’re interested in hacking an app using Bungee Connect.

Brad

Update: We’ll also have and XBOX 360 and Wii for Guitar Hero, Rockband, Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3.

If you’d like to connect with us at the event just drop by the booth on the expo floor or email me (brad AT bungeelabs DOT com) or Ted (ted AT bungeelabs DOT com).

Brad

Yesterday was day two of the “Mashup University” part of the show, which is the part with the pre-scheduled technical presentations. (The rest of Mashup Camp is conducted as an unconference.)

Our Presentation
Brad and I showed to an audience of around 100 attendees. Brad kicked it off with an overview of Bungee Labs’ vision of Platform as a Service (PaaS). I did a whirlwind demo of the WideLens reference app and Bungee Connect. We had a lot of good follow-up questions, and judging by the positive reception, I think we’re finally zeroing in on how best to explain the technology frontier that Bungee Labs is trying to open up.

SpeedGeeking
Six tables, with conference attendees broken into five groups, each group roving to each table for a rapid-fire, five minute Mashup demo. Each attendee has a wooden nickel with which they can later cast a vote for “best mashup.” The prize? A 17″ MacBook Pro. [Update: It turns out that the MacBook is for the speedgeeking mashup competition for general attendees. The vendor attendees were in a separate speedgeeking round, for which no winner will be announced.]

My friend and colleague Brad, who did not inform me of the impending event until maybe ten minutes before it started, ditched out suddenly, leaving me to do all five demo rounds. It was an exhausting half hour, but with WideLens in hand, I had a great mash-up to show off, and–even better–give to the attendees as source code for deriving their own version. How could it go wrong? At the end of the event, several people had decided to leave their wooden nickels with me rather than wait for the next day’s voting.

People
Perhaps the biggest value gained by attending a conference is the connections you make. Among the attendees, there is a level of passion for web technologies that is rare to find, and the immersive environment of Mashup Camp instills you with a sense of hope and inspiration.

I got to spend a little time hanging out with John Musser, the man behind Programmable Web. John’s up for recording another interview here at the conference, so I hope to be able to have that on The Bungee Line soon.

David Nielson, formerly of StrikeIron and who recently wrote a definitive paper on integrating WideLens with Salesforce.com is also here. He’s a good guy to know.

Conference “Chief Content Officer” David Berlind is a good guy to know, too. But more fun is to watch him scramble about trying to keep the conference on track.

Other Happenings in Silicon Valley

Last night I got together with my friend Todd Dailey from Apple. He’s one of their small team of rockstars who handle Apple’s executive briefings. While I don’t consider myself an Apple fanboy, when he invited Brad and me to come down to Cupertino this afternoon for a personal tour of Apple’s campus, how could I refuse? Hey, Brad, remember how you ditched me yesterday?

–Ted

Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger will be hanging out on Tue (Mar 18), Wed and Thurs showing off the latest Bungee goodness.

Brad and Ted will be giving a demo of Bungee Connect on Tuesday Mar 18th at 2:30.

If you want to connect with Brad or Ted, you can contact them at:

• brad [at] bungeelabs [dot] com
• ted [at] bungeelabs [dot] com

The monthly  Jump Cast for Bungee Connect Developer Network is coming up on Tuesday, March 25 at 2:00 MDT.The Jump Cast provides BCDN developers with an opportunity to talk directly with the Bungee team, and ask questions about Bungee Connect. Agenda for this Jump Call:

1. What’s New? Product Manager Dave Brooksby tells what we put into the latest update
2. Tech Topic: to be announced: “SQL Programming in Bungee Connect”
3. Open Q&A

To register for the event, see the forums post in Bungee Connect Developer Network.

We can’t wait to see what these very smart 9 CS students come up with using Bungee Connect and the WideLens reference app we’ve asked them to hack against.

Thanks to M.David (blogging this here) and Daniel Posch (one of last year’s summer Intern at Bungee Labs) who both agreed to join the contest’s judging panel.

Here are some pics from the 24 hour event.

Frisbee later…

Alex Barnett, Bungee Labs.