BillDay.com » Personal http://billday.com Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:59:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Innovate 2011 Highlights http://billday.com/2011/11/09/innovate-2011-highlights/ http://billday.com/2011/11/09/innovate-2011-highlights/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:10:43 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3805

I was recently privileged to attend both the O’Reilly Android Open and X.commerce Innovate conferences back-to-back in San Francisco. Both were mind and network expanding events, and I’d highly recommend either to developers and business colleagues considering attending next year.

I hope to write more about my key takeaways from Android Open at some point in the future. For this article, let’s focus on Innovate.

So much transpired in a few short days that it would be impossible to capture everything in one short article. I’ll do my best to give you the overall flavor and major highlights, then I’ll dive a bit deeper to discuss some of the particular technical “breakout” sessions I attended.

Ready? Let’s go!

Keynotes and major announcements

The conference began each morning with a series of general session keynotes. You can access the conference schedule to see a full list of speakers, or better still, watch the keynotes (as well as breakout sessions) from the Innovate 2011 video site (click here to access).

Watch the Day 1 keynotes for yourself below (click here if the embed doesn’t work below):

Naveed Anwar, head of X.commerce community, discussed many of the key Day 1 developments in his blog post here. Some of the big ticket items for developers and merchants included:

  • Launch of the “X.commerce Fabric“, a message-broker based system allowing developers to integrate and use various commerce capabilities. The Fabric ties together various components from eBay, PayPal, Magento, and other eBay companies with capabilities built by third parties, large and small. Much more on this to come.
  • PayPal debuted “PayPal Access“, a new online “commerce identity” comparable to social identity, but for making commerce transactions faster and easier for the consumer. Read more about PayPal Access from the Janrain blog; I’ll also have much more to say about PayPal Access in coming months.
  • Magento launched much tighter integration with eBay, allowing merchants to push products from Magento into eBay with just a few short clicks. You can read a third party take on the many and central Magento-related announcements via AuctionBytes (click here).
  • Facebook announced Open Graph integration with Magento and GSI Commerce enabling, among other things, “Want” and “Own” buttons analogous to the already ubiquitous “Like” button. You can read much more about the eBay-Facebook partnership in this ZDNet article.

With the major announcements out of the way, the Day 1 afternoon and Day 2 morning keynotes could focus on inspirational higher ordered bits. These sessions were great motivation for attendees to take advantage of all of the technical tools at their disposal to make the world a better place. Whether by building corporate giving into their fundamental commercial business model, or by thinking about the effects of the current recession and the innovation that could get us out of it, or by imbuing everything we do with thoughtful design, these sessions were all meant to light the creative spark.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Steven Cooper (@developersteve), whom I featured in an interview article for the X.com site last year, receive a community award at the beginning of the day 2 morning keynotes. You can watch the awards presentation and all of the Day 2 keynotes here:

If the embed fails to load, you can alternatively click here for the Day 2 morning general session.

Other things I found striking during the second morning’s general session:

  • Marshal Cohen spoke at length about the current recession and what might need doing, especially in the United States, to innovate our way out of it. One item in particular stuck with me: He pointed out that while the current recession is not the longest in US history (yet), it is the deepest by job losses. I have to agree with his conclusion that a fundamental shift is underway and many of the lost jobs aren’t coming back, so it’s more important than ever to focus on new commerce opportunities. Build your business to take advantage of inevitable innovations and the sky’s the limit.
  • X.commerce developer evangelist Praveen Alavilli (@ppalavilli) showed some live X.commerce code in front of thousands. Always a gutsy move! Access his demo code yourself from GitHub here. By the way, Praveen has written a great blog post about getting started with the Fabric since Innovate completed; click here to check it out.
  • Hip-hop artist Chamillionaire (@chamillionaire) stole the show discussing how he used community and tech skills to build his fan base from the streets of Houston to the Grammys and beyond. What an amazing innovator! I’d highly recommend watching at least his portion of the day 2 keynote; prepare to be impressed and inspired.

I could write several more articles about the various keynote speakers and their stories. Instead, I’ll encourage you again to watch the videos for yourself.

Partner pavilion and a free O’Reilly book for you

There was a wide range of X.commerce partners showing their wares in the Partner Pavilion during and in between sessions. Somtimes I wondered just how they were packing so many thousands of attendees in such a small space! (The secret, of course, was lots of free coffee, snacks, and soda.)

Here’s a shot I took the first day of the X.commerce booth to give you a feel for the foot traffic:

One other cool thing going on in the Partner Pavilion, in my not so humble opinion, was that O’Reilly Media was giving away printed copies of the new book “Building eCommerce Applications”. This book is a collection of some of the most interesting and varied articles written by contributors to the X.commerce DevZone.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the conference, you can still download a free e-book copy from O’Reilly (click here to get your copy).

And yes, yours truly does have four articles included in the book, so I am a bit biased. Still, you can’t beat free, right?

Session highlights

I attended a number of interesting sessions at the conference. Rather than try to list them all, I thought I’d focus on the key points from the most interesting and useful for me.

  • Two related sessions, “Introducing the X.commerce platform” and “From Code to Capability“, showed developers how to get started with the dive deep into the new X.commerce Fabric. I’d highly recommend clicking on the session titles and watching the sessions to get up to speed asap. You should also download the X.commerce Developer Package and the X.commerce Innovate demo code so you can try it out for yourself. Fabric will be a very important piece of the commerce development puzzle in the months to come.
  • We all know mobile commerce is a BIG opportunity, right? What you might or might not know is how to take advantage of the various social, local, and mobile development strategies to capitalize upon it. “Commerce goes SoLoMo: Social, Local, Mobile” discusses what’s possible, focusing on Milo and Where.com (both eBay companies) in particular. I’d also recommend watching the “Mobile face-off: HTML5 vs. native apps vs. mobile platforms” panel to get a grip on the realities of native, HTML, and hybrid mobile development. I enjoyed both sessions and took away the point that we can do almost anything with today’s mobile technologies (boy have we come a long way since WAP and J2ME!).

Things to watch in the coming year

In summary, Innovate was crammed full of technologies to watch and good information on getting started with them. I’d recommend trying out Fabric and Access as soon as possible and paying attention to both as they roll out in the months ahead. There are also some very nice Magento and Facebook commerce opportunities coming; pay attention, and profit!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference, the news coming out of it, and the new commerce possibilities available as a result of those announcements. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think. And happy commerce hacking!

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

]]> http://billday.com/2011/11/09/innovate-2011-highlights/feed/ 1 Launch of the Health Graph blog http://billday.com/2011/10/20/launch-of-the-health-graph-blog/ http://billday.com/2011/10/20/launch-of-the-health-graph-blog/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:34:09 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3758 I’m excited to announce that RunKeeper has launched a new Health Graph blog!

You can access the blog at: http://blog.healthgraph.com/

There are links on the blog to subscribe via RSS and email. The blog also links to recent @healthgraphapi tweets and our Health Graph Facebook page.

Here’s the first post to give you a feel for what the new blog will cover:

Welcome! This blog helps developers learn about and use the Health Graph. There will be many more details to come in future posts, but to get things started, here’s a quick rundown of the major Health Graph resources:

You can access a technical overview of the RESTful Health Graph API by clicking here.

When you’re ready to get started building a Health Graph API application, visit the RunKeeper Partner page and click “Connect To Our API“.

Need some inspiration to get your developer juices flowing? Check out some of the applications built and deployed using the Health Graph API, available from the RunKeeper Apps page (click here).

And when you encounter issues, you can ask questions and join in the developer conversation by visiting the Health Graph discussion group.

Let’s build a healthier world together!

Click to access the Health Graph developer site

]]> http://billday.com/2011/10/20/launch-of-the-health-graph-blog/feed/ 0 RunKeeper rocks! http://billday.com/2011/10/04/runkeeper-rocks/ http://billday.com/2011/10/04/runkeeper-rocks/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:05:13 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3735 I am pumped to announce that I’ve joined RunKeeper as Platform Evangelist for the Health Graph API.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement on the RunKeeper blog discussing how and why I’m so excited to join the team:

Click to access my RunKeeper user page

My personal journey into running, and thereby to RunKeeper, started a couple of years ago. I decided to join some family on a Colorado hunting and hiking trip in early fall 2009. As part of getting ready for that trip, I took a hard look at my fitness. I didn’t like what I saw.

I was fifty pounds overweight. I knew I needed to make some changes to both my diet and my level of physical activity. For diet, that led to colorful veggies and Greek yogurt, along with fewer desserts and seconds. For exercise, I settled on running.

Prior to this, I’d always hated running. Well, distance running, anyway. I loved baseball, but that only involved short sprints. And I’d had a long term on-again, off-again love affair with cycling, but never far or fast enough to give me any serious aches and pains. For me, running was the punishment given out by other sports.

But then I came across a plan from a gentleman named Cameron Hanes that helped me ease into running thirty minutes at a time, three or four times per week. Cameron outlined walking ten minutes, running five, then repeating both each outing for the first two weeks. Then his plan built up gradually over eight weeks to one hour per run, most of it running instead of walking.

Having a plan with specific, measurable “baby steps” made fitness achievable for me. I followed the Hanes plan, ran my first 5k race, and actually enjoyed it. I ran another, and shaved off a pretty good chunk of time. Then I went on the Colorado trip and found myself much fitter and happier hiking at altitude than I’d ever been before. I felt the benefits of the last couple of months of running. That’s when I made the decision to train for a 10k trail race, and from that came several half marathons and now a full marathon later this fall.

I’ve lost the fifty pounds and kept it off through running and eating right. Now I can’t imagine going more than a day or two without running. And I want to share my passion for fitness with everyone I can.

Enter RunKeeper. I tried several fitness apps as I got deeper into running and wanted to record and analyze my runs. RunKeeper stood out as the best for my purposes. I followed @runkeeper as a user, and was pleasantly surprised when RunKeeper CEO, Jason Jacobs (@jjacobs22), responded to some things I posted. I started following him on Twitter, and it was from that follow that I first saw the post for a Health Graph Platform Evangelist position. I immediately knew I had to apply–the role combines both my personal passion for fitness and running with my professional passion for developer advocacy and working with partners to solve real world problems.

When I spoke with Jason and the rest of the RunKeeper team, I found this same enthusiasm for fitness and improving the world’s health in the RunKeeper team. I was hooked! A couple months later and here I am, getting to spread the good word about the Health Graph API. I can’t wait to work with you!

A little bit more about me professionally: My background is in aerospace and software engineering. I leveraged that, along with passions for writing and speaking, to become a developer advocate and evangelist. I’ve been blessed to evangelize mobile, web, and OS technologies for the likes of Sun, Nokia, and Digital Reasoning Systems over the last twelve years. Most recently I’ve been working with O’Reilly Media to help developers understand and take advantage of the PayPal X payments platform.

I’d like to hear about your involvement with RunKeeper and the Health Graph API. I’m especially interested in your suggestions for making the API easier to use and more profitable for you. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know. You can contact me via email to bill@runkeeper.com or Twitter @billday. You can also find me on RunKeeper, and LinkedIn.

Looking forward to helping you succeed with the Health Graph!
Bill

More about my path into running from my Ignite talk “Run for Your Life!” recorded early last year, when I was about eight months into my journey:

]]> http://billday.com/2011/10/04/runkeeper-rocks/feed/ 0 New horizons at Innovate and beyond http://billday.com/2011/09/30/new-horizons-at-innovate-and-beyond/ http://billday.com/2011/09/30/new-horizons-at-innovate-and-beyond/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:10:07 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3729 It's been a little over fourteen months since I started regularly blogging on X.com.  A lot has happened during that time in the world of payments, and for me professionally, too.  I have some personal news to share in a moment, but let's recap payments developments and look at next month's big ticket item first.

Each month or so I've tried to post PayPal and payments highlights.  Here's a quick rundown of those since last summer:

July 2011 | June | May | April | March | February | January 2011-December 2010 | 2010 semiannual (July-December) | November | October | September | August | July 2010

Note the gap for August and September 2011 highlights.  There's been so much going on with the new X.commerce including recent X.com site rework, plus lots of other big news in payments and the larger development world, that I've decided to link directly to weekly highlight posts on my own site so you have all the latest.  Drill into each for the most important payments news from that week.

As we head into October, all of the recent developments above point to one place:  the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco.

I've written previously about PayPal's strategy and vision which will be on full display at Innovate.  I've also pointed you to the conference site including speakers and schedule, and teased you with a report that a big Facebook related announcement may be coming at Innovate.  Now my only question to you is, will you be attending Innovate to take it all in for yourself?

I ask because I'll be there meeting people, studying the latest in payments, and covering the conference for an upcoming X.com article.  And I'd love to meet you and get your take on payments and X.commerce.  In fact, I'll also be at Android Open the two days immediately before Innovate; if you'll be attending that conference, I'd love to get a chance to chat there, too.  Please leave a comment below if you'd like to get together at either event.

And there's one more thing…

I've accepted a new position which I'll be starting soon.  Though I will still write articles for X.com from time to time, I will no longer be blogging regularly there.  So if you'd like to keep up with my ongoing thoughts on payments or get the skinny on my new digs, please follow me on Twitter (@billday) or subscribe to my personal blog (BillDay.com).

Good luck, have fun, and never stop learning!

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/30/new-horizons-at-innovate-and-beyond/feed/ 0 New content locations on X.com http://billday.com/2011/09/26/new-content-locations-on-x-com/ http://billday.com/2011/09/26/new-content-locations-on-x-com/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:10:46 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3628

By now you've probably noticed that PayPal has launched its reworked X.com site in anticipation of merging in the eBay and Magento developer sites in the near future.

All in all, this is a good thing.  But there are some issues that you, as a developer community member, should be aware of.  The biggest in my opinion is the fact that many content locations have now changed, and redirects are not in place for all of them to automagically transport you to the correct new location.

Here are a couple of examples I've bumped up against with my own writing and content:

First, my blog posts formerly appeared in the DevZone section at https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/devzone/blog with date strings included in their path; they are now located at https://www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/billday without any date strings.

For example, my July highlights post which was formerly at https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/devzone/blog/2011/08/04/summertime-and-the-highlights-are-easy is now at https://www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/billday/summertime-and-highlights-are-easy.

Second, my X.commerce articles were formerly published with URLs such as https://www.x.com/docs/ with a DOC number at the end, e.g. https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-3752 for the final part of my "Alternative Payment Systems" series.

Articles are now published at URLs beginning with https://www.x.com/content/, with the hyphenated article title appended. For the article above, for instance, the new location is https://www.x.com/content/alternative-payment-systems-part-6-comparing-options.

What should you do if you're looking for a particular piece of content and can't find it?  I'd suggest searching for the title of the missing item using the "search x.commerce ecosystem" search box in the upper right of X.com pages.  So far that's turned up everything I needed to find.

What other rough edges have you found in the site redesign?  Please give the X.com team your feedback by leaving a comment on the full X.com post.

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/26/new-content-locations-on-x-com/feed/ 0 Notes from the week of 2011-09-25 http://billday.com/2011/09/25/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-25/ http://billday.com/2011/09/25/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-25/#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 10:59:00 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/2011/09/25/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-25/

RunKeeper and the Health Graph API

PayPal X Platform

Big data

APIs and development

  • Researchers successfully hack SSL http://t.co/njh1f7vO (and use their trojan to decrypt a @PayPal authentication cookie, no less) #
  • How to supercharge your favorite web apps with If-This-Then-That http://t.co/buwzbqQQ (easier than it sounds) #
  • Note to self: Setup tweet-to-Google+ as soon as there's a G+ IfTTT channel supporting that action #
  • “Your API is not a website!” @apigee webinar video and slides http://t.co/NAthF352 #
  • "Thinking like a platform…helps your business prepare for disruptive forces you cannot possibly predict" http://t.co/V9MUOavK #

Personal things

Running

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/25/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-25/feed/ 0 X.commerce Innovate conference speakers and tracks http://billday.com/2011/09/23/x-commerce-innovate-conference-speakers-and-tracks/ http://billday.com/2011/09/23/x-commerce-innovate-conference-speakers-and-tracks/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:10:45 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3624 We're less than one month away from the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference and if you're attending, it's time to start sorting out which speakers you'd like to listen to and maybe meet and discuss your questions, issues, or problems with.

The conference schedule is available online (click here to access).  The main conference runs October 12th and 13th.  There is also a special developers-only "X dev camp" slated for October 14th; if interested, you need to apply for it when you register to attend the conference.

You can also access information on all of the speakers including the session speakers as well as keynoters.  For my money, the sessions are "where it's at", so I'm studying the session speaker pages carefully to figure out whose sessions I might want to attend.

Perhaps the best way currently available to navigate and plan your conference is to look at the speakers broken out by track (click here), then click on each of those speakers to learn more.  It would be even better if there were links from the speaker pages to detailed session information, but as of now that information appears to be MIA.

Honestly, I find myself wishing that Innovate had a conference attendee session planner akin to the one that O'Reilly uses for their conferences.  For example, see the "Customize Your Own Schedule" feature in their Android Open conference schedule page to see what I mean.  (Yes, I'll be attending Android Open the same week as Innovate, so both of their scheduling features are front-of-mind for me right now.)

Will you be attending Innovate?  What speakers look interesting to you if so?

Click here to read and leave comments on the complete post on X.com.

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/23/x-commerce-innovate-conference-speakers-and-tracks/feed/ 0 Breathtaking Earth flyover http://billday.com/2011/09/19/breathtaking-earth-flyover/ http://billday.com/2011/09/19/breathtaking-earth-flyover/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:44:53 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3639 Stunning time lapse composite of ISS images as if flew over North and South America. Must watch!

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/19/breathtaking-earth-flyover/feed/ 0 PayPal’s vision for shopping and payments http://billday.com/2011/09/19/paypal%e2%80%99s-vision-for-shopping-and-payments/ http://billday.com/2011/09/19/paypal%e2%80%99s-vision-for-shopping-and-payments/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:10:15 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/?p=3601 PayPal gave the world a sneak peek this week of some of the new technologies and initiatives they'll be launching at next month's X.commerce Innovate conference.

As PayPal President Scott Thompson noted in his blog post:

PayPal is re-imagining money and making it work better for merchants and consumers – whatever device you’re on, wherever you are in the world, and however you prefer to pay (whether that’s cash, credit, or installments).

He went on to say:

We’re rolling out a one-stop shop for merchants to engage their customers directly during every part of the shopping lifecycle –  generating demand from consumers through location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device (not just from the mobile phone), and offering more flexibility to customers even after they’ve checked out.

The blog announcement also included this teaser image:

but honestly I think this video from the preview event shows PayPal's new innovations better than any static image could:

You can read more about the sneak peek via this coverage from GigaOm (click here to read).

Click here to read the complete post on X.com including Bill’s plans for Innovate.

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/19/paypal%e2%80%99s-vision-for-shopping-and-payments/feed/ 0 Notes from the week of 2011-09-18 http://billday.com/2011/09/18/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-18/ http://billday.com/2011/09/18/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-18/#comments Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:59:00 +0000 Bill Day http://billday.com/2011/09/18/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-18/ RunKeeper and the Health Graph API

Wireless and mobility

Big data

APIs and development

Personal things

Running

]]> http://billday.com/2011/09/18/notes-from-the-week-of-2011-09-18/feed/ 0