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Engineering Serendipity to Instigate and Delight

A session at SXSW Interactive 2012

The non-mobile web has always offered on-demand experiences for users to search for and discover new online content. But with the proliferation of mobile phones that report real-time signals like location, apps and services have a new ability to serendipitously deliver contextually-relevant value through push notifications. If you’re building a mobile service and have access to this data, can you use it with push notifications to do what you do better for your users, wherever they are? Our panelists have all built products and platforms that illuminate the social and informational opportunities hidden around us everyday. We’ve balanced privacy, timing, and proximity in order to nudge our users off their familiar paths and into discovering the people and world around them, and you can too -- for fun AND profit!

About the speakers

This person is speaking at this event.
Gabe Smedresman

Co-founder, Meet Gatsby

Gabe is a game designer and engineer based out of San Francisco. Coming from a background in tech (Google), architecture (Yale), and real-world games (The Go Game), Gabe specializes in integrating real-world data with gameplay and virtual environments. He designed a pioneering series of massively multiplayer games of RISK on college campuses, and his games and playful technology have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Fox News, and most technology blogs. Gabe is currently working on a number of location-aware entertainment projects including Meet Gatsby, a mobile service that introduces you to nearby people who share your interests, wherever you do.

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Aaron Parecki

Lead Developer, Geoloqi.com

Aaron Parecki is co-founder of Geoloqi, a powerful platform that lets developers easily build location-based apps and bring large datasets to life. In his free time, he enjoys geolocation, linguistics, and building home automation systems and IRC bots with a sense of humor. For the past 3+ years, he has been tracking and visualizing his location at 6-second intervals. His fascination with location sharing and GPS began at the age of 6, when he traced the routes of family road trips on a map with a highlighter.

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Brett Martin

CEO, Sonar

Brett Martin is co-founder and CEO of Sonar, a location-based mobile application that leverages social network data to reveal hidden connections and interests you share with the people nearby. Prior to Sonar, Brett helped found AppFund, a seed stage mobile incubator from K2 Media Labs. Before K2, he studied early stage startups as a Fulbright Scholar in Milan, helped launch Vice Magazine's VBS.tv, and worked on Wall Street as an equity research associate. Brett attended Dartmouth College and grew up in Ocean City, MD.

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Aston Motes

Coder, Dropbox

Aston Motes was the first hire at Dropbox and over the last four plus years has worked on everything from the Dropbox.com website to creating the API thousands of 3rd-party developers use today. Previous to Dropbox, he enjoyed a short stint at OkCupid where he was an early hire and one of the primary engineers on CrazyBlindDate.com, a website that did exactly what its name suggests.

This person is speaking at this event.
Ben Carey

Artist, Benrik

Co-founder of Benrik, with Henrik Delehag. Benrik are London-based authors and artists. Their output ranges across different media and includes the cult bestseller "This Diary Will Change Your Life" book series, as well as the geolocation app "Situationist", which creates random encounters between complete strangers.

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50 attendees

  • Aston Motes
  • Aaron Parecki
  • Francesco D'Orazio
  • Aparna Mukherjee
  • ashmeister13
  • Benrik
  • Björn Jeffery
  • Brian Papa
  • Brett Martin
  • Amber Case
  • David F. Bills
  • Don Turnbull
  • EJ Lawless
  • John ousby
  • Gabe Smedresman
  • Greg Raiz
  • Garrett Stettler
  • Hadley Beeman
  • Hello Operator
  • hugh garry
  • James Mayes
  • James Ketchell
  • Jason Packham
  • Jen Nausin
  • Jennifer Brogee
  • Jeremy
  • Matthew Hawn
  • katiesmithadair
  • Kesah
  • Kevin S Prince
  • mike kuzin
  • Kyle Wegner
  • kejia zhu
  • Loren Crawford
  • Robert Mao
  • Moritz Stefaner
  • Maria Varmazis
  • Niran Babalola
  • Noah Sacksteder
  • Markus Wegscheider
  • Ross Gebhart
  • sermad
  • sheri
  • Oscar Llarena
  • Kari Sullivan
  • Tall Tom
  • Garrett Tillman
  • thisisaaronland
  • Thomas Evans
  • Z. Bryant

31 trackers

  • Alan Botvinick
  • Marina Aubert
  • Ben Firshman
  • Bill DeRouchey
  • Keith Chu
  • Charles Thornburgh
  • Chemese
  • Cindy Li
  • Darren Gibbons
  • Diana Huang
  • Matt Gibson
  • Evan Prodromou
  • Dirk Ginader
  • Jay Owens
  • Mary Zhu
  • Nathan Heskew
  • Dan Williams
  • Joel Parr
  • ɹǝɯoɹʞ (dılɟ) dılıɥd
  • Natalie Downe
  • Patricia Marinho
  • Paul McAleer
  • Ryan Freebern
  • Ryan Berg
  • Shay Howe
  • Yesenia Sotelo
  • Janna Bastow
  • tiffany kosolcharoen
  • tim deSilva
  • Tom Warmbrodt
  • Alicia Johnson

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When

Time 5:00pm6:00pm CST

Date Sat 10th March 2012

Where

Salon J, Hilton Austin Downtown

Session type

Panel

Session Hash Tag

#serendipity

Short URL

lanyrd.com/spmkb

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Topics

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