Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your interest in the Health Graph API.

David Cohen: I am a senior software developer for Isobar North America, focusing mostly on back-end development in the worlds of Java and PHP. I also box on a (very) amateur level and am in the very early contemplative stages of what kind of Health Graph application I could develop to work with that.

After participating in Isobar’s Create 48 NFC Hackathon as part of Team Beer Pants Meeting, I became aware of and interested in working with the Health Graph API through a series of similar hackathon events hosted by Terrible Labs.

BD: Why did you develop your own Java wrapper for accessing the Health Graph API?

DC: In the setting of a series of shorter hackathons – being a few hours at a time rather than a marathon over the course of several days – developing a wrapper in a language that I was already familiar with seemed like a great way to both become familiar with the new API and to provide a tool that would be of use to Java developers who wanted to created Health Graph applications in the future.

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API does your wrapper support? Do you use all of them in your own application?

DC: The wrapper is currently a work in progress, but the goal is to have it support the entire Health Graph API. I do not currently have my own application built off of the wrapper but I do hope to be able to use it for application development in the near future.

BD: Are there any portions of the Health Graph API that you don’t currently support but plan to in the future?

DC: There are plenty of portions that are still works in progress, but nothing that isn’t currently being worked on in terms of support.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

DC: I love the depth of data potentially represented by the Health Graph. It’s hard to look at API specifications and not have at least a few ideas for a mash-up application come to mind.

The only problem I see is right now is one that most new projects, especially ones with a large scope, suffer from: The documentation could use some improvements. It should call out specific changes when API updates are made.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

DC: Having not really worked on the application development layer yet, my new feature request might not be ground-breakingly exciting but I would love to see an API call added that contained a map of the MIME types with keys that would not change, so that I could dynamically create my MIME type maps for wrapper calls and not have to worry about getting bad requests when the API updates.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your wrapper? What’s coming next that Health Graph developers may be excited about?

DC: Once the wrapper is stable and contains all of the current API features, I plan on writing a sample application that will give developers a good place to start implementing the features contained within the Health Graph and wrapper. After that I may even start working on an application of my own!

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your wrapper?

DC: Just that so far it has been a great experience working with the Health Graph and the RunKeeper team. You all have been nothing short of extraordinarily helpful and ready to answer all of my requests and point out when my “bug reports” are real or just me implementing something poorly. So thanks!

(Editor’s note: You can see David and Team Beer Pants Meeting in action at Isobar’s hackathon around 3:16 into the video below.)

Isobar Create 48 NFC Hackathon from Isobar US on Vimeo.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Fascinating morning keynotes

Android Open was jam packed with activities including a pre-conference day of workshops and then two days of main conference. Each morning of the regular conference began with a series of five to twenty minute long keynote talks and panels. You can see a complete listing of the speakers for both days in the conference schedule. You can also watch the keynote sessions via the Android Open 2011 Youtube video playlist (click here to access). I would encourage you to watch as many of the keynotes as possible; they contain a lot of interesting and inspirational material to get your Android juices flowing!

O’Reilly founder & CEO Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) kicked things off with his Day 1 opening keynote “What Android can learn from Steve Jobs“. Definitely an interesting choice of title for an Android conference! But Jobs’ passing the week before presented O’Reilly with an opportunity to discuss some of the key principles behind Apple’s success, especially the notion espoused by Jobs that a company needs to be “true to its soul”. O’Reilly examined Google’s “soul” at length, suggesting that it needs to never forget its original mission to help connect people to all the world’s information. Key takeaway for Android developers and businesses: Stay true to yourself and your mission while holding Google to its own high ideals, too.

The next keynote that caught my attention was a conversation between conference co-chair Marko Gargenta (@markogargenta) and Robert Stephens (@rstephens), CTO of Best Buy. Stephens is a pretty technical guy, even going so far as to say that Best Buy ought to get rid of their DVD section and replace it with an Arduino section! As you might imagine given the crowd, this was well received.

The thing that really stood out for me as a mobile payments developer, however, was Stephens’ discussion of the many issues with NFC deployment. He said Best Buy may bypass at least some NFC generations completely, going straight to purely cloud-based payments solutions. This joins the rising tide of anti-NFC sentiment and pragmatism that seems to be building, and echoes some of the many things PayPal has said publicly about NFC weaknesses in recent months. Takeaway: Watch major retailers such as Best Buy closely to pick up the beginnings of big shifts in mobile payments.

Day 2 saw a couple more morning keynotes that stood out for me. The first, “Android in Space” by Will Marshall (@wsm1) of NASA, dealt with building very cheap microsatellites based upon Android-based Nexus One smartphones, aka “phonesats“. “Very cheap” in this case means tens of thousands versus millions or billions of US dollars.

Marshall noted that because of the conservative nature of space flight, the CPU in phonesat Nexus Ones will actually be the fastest CPUs onboard a satellite to date when they’re launched into orbit later this year. He also asked the audience some provocative questions such as “What if we could each have personal satellites?” and “What if satellites became a software domain?”. Thing to note: Android software and off the shelf mobile phone hardware can reduce costs in some areas by two or more orders of magnitude versus traditional ways of doing things, and that could change everything in those areas.

You can read more about the phonesat project from this report from O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard (@digiphile). Among other things, Alex links to an excellent documentary on early phonesat rocket launch testing.

The final keynote that fascinated me was “The African Laptop Killer: Android and the Developing World” by Claire Hunsaker (@chunsaker). Hunsaker discussed the tremendous rise of mobile technology in Kenya and elsewhere and how that technology is revolutionizing lives and economies. Some of the statistics quoted include:

• 99% of Internet access in Kenya is via mobile device.
• Cheap Android phones have dropped Internet access in Kenya from 31% of an average worker’s annual income to about 5%.
• Fully 20% of Kenyan GDP runs through the mobile wallet (predominantly M-PESA).
• According to Hunsaker, “Facebook will have access to most (Kenyan) users before thy can even own a mobile handset themselves” via borrowed/shared mobile handsets.

Please watch Hunsaker’s talk. It may change your perspective on the power and importance of mobile techologies.

Session highlights

There were a lot of great sessions at Android Open. Here are some notes from my favorites:

• Aleksandar Gargenta (yes, Marko is his brother) presented an excellent “Securing Android” session discussing how security is enforced. He made a number of comparisons to Java ME and desktop Linux security, noting that “Anytime something is in RAM, there are ways of recovering it”. I’d recommend spending a little time reading through Aleksandar’s slides (click here).
• Eric Burke (@burke_eric) from Square gave a nice “Beautiful Android” talk. I’d been hoping for a few payments fireworks, but Burke stuck closely to how to build attractive and functional Android apps. Among the things he noted, Android clip paths don’t handle antialiasing. This leads to very ugly interfaces unless you use offscreen bitmaps.
• Nick Farina (@nfarina) spoke about the importance of using WebViews in “From iOS to Android” (also, XCode is painful).
• Sean Byrnes of Flurry knocked it out of the park with his “Android App Engagement by the Numbers” talk! In particular, he called out the importance of releasing early and quickly to your followers, as statistics show that on average, an Android developer loses 38% of their users on the day they install your app, 50% in one week.
• Jesse Vincent (@obra) talked in “Dancing App Stores” about the somewhat suprising fact that new app versions dramatically increase sales, even with minimal changes to the app itself. He also made some good suggestions on secondary and tertiary app markets besides Google’s Android Market; check out his slides for more details.

All in all, the sessions had enough code and technical details while still being able to spark ideas in a wide variety of attendees, some Android programmers, some not.

Additional coverage and news from the conference

Conference organizers made a number of other news and information sources available to attendees. You can search some of the best via these links:

• Read the round-up of news and coverage curated by O’Reilly.
• Access all of the speaker slides provided to the organizers.
• View official conference photos.

One more highly recommended resource: The online show “All About Android” (@androidshow) broadcast live from Android Open at the end of Day 1. The conference co-chairs along with several speakers including Tim O’Reilly make appearances on the show. It’s probably worth your time to watch and get their perspective on the major Android developments flowing out of the conference.

Did it blend?

I found this first ever Android Open to be a great mix of community and technology. It struck the right tone of openness and provided both developer how-to and business oriented material. If you are interested in Android and appreciate a balanced perspective of the entire ecosystem, I would recommend this conference as a good place to tap into all things Android.

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

DEVELOPER EVANGELIST

Can you evangelize products for one of the largest local ad networks? Do you have an infectious enthusiasm for technology and mobile and web development?

CityGrid Media is an online media company that connects mobile and web publishers with local businesses by linking them through CityGrid®, its local content and advertising network. CityGrid Media owns and operates leading local consumer properties including Urbanspoon, Citysearch, and Insider Pages.

More local data and content for all. New local ads for everyone. And better performance all around. And it’s free. Our #1 goal is to see developers of all sizes thrive in local. We help developers give their local audience a better experience and get paid to do it. The CityGrid® network APIs give developers access to premium local content including user reviews, editorial content, merchant messages & more, across 75K neighborhoods nationwide.

We are looking for a Developer Evangelist to be the spokesperson, mediator and translator between the development community and our company; and facilitate the proliferation of our APIs through code tutorials, workshops, blogging, public speaking, training, and social events like MeetUps.

Our ideal evangelist will have experience with:

• hands on development with Java, Ruby, Python or other open source languages
• architecture and implementations utilizing APIs
• open source community through blogging or contributions
• involvement with conferences, MeetUps, and other social web coverage
• experimentation with new development languages, architectures, and tools

Additional qualifications include:

• B.S. in Computer Science (M.S. or Ph.D is highly desired)
• a true passion of innovation and open source technologies
• a willingness to be the “go to person” for a development community
• ability to give technical presentations, manage MeetUp groups and online forums
• 10+ years of software engineering experience + development utilizing Big Data tools
• willingness to travel 20% – 40% of the time

If you can carry the flag for our data products to the development community, we want to hear from you today!

CityGrid Media is an equal opportunity employer.

SENIOR WEB DEVELOPER

The successful candidate will be responsible for developing, testing, enhancing and maintaining Java/J2EE applications. This role will participate in the design, development and test phases of the application development lifecycle. This is a technical role which requires object-oriented programming skills, understanding of J2EE application architecture, XML and Web application security.

Responsibilities include:

• Develop, test, debug and document web based Java/J2EE applications in accordance with system architecture requirements.
• Apply industry standard object-oriented programming best practices and J2EE design patterns.
• Plan, initiate and conduct unit testing of applications as well as facilitate system testing.
• Support and troubleshoot production applications.
• Understand system performance associated with the introduction of new technologies.
• Strong problem solving skills; find solid solutions to complex problems quickly.
• As a part of a project team, share technical and product knowledge with other team members.
• Participate in technology/tools evaluation and software technical proof of concepts.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in related field preferred, work experience may be substituted.
• Java certification preferred.
• 5+ years experience in a similar role preferably in a mid-size to large corporate environment.
• Experience with Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) a plus.

Skills and knowledge:

• Expert knowledge of Java (J2SE and J2EE), XML, HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, PL/SQL, and open source projects (Spring, Log4j, AJAX, Subversion, Ibatis, etc.).
• Familiarity with J2EE design patterns, software architecture concepts and web application security.
• Excellent object-oriented programming skills and strong analytical and design skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills.
• Must possess the ability to read and interpret technical specifications, use case scenarios, test cases, and software requirements.
• Knowledge and understanding of relational database design and programming using Oracle 9i.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.

Please tell Nick I sent you if you’re interested.