Back in February I was invited to participate in an pre-beta release of the Amazon Echo SDK. I was under NDA so I couldn’t share any of my finding here. But now that NDA has expired and I can share some of the integrations I did with this interesting device. First of all I want to comment… Read More
Noel’s Amazon Echo Hack
Noel (@noelportugal) is one of a handful of early adopters to get his hands on the Amazon Echo, Amazon’s in-home personal assistant, and being the curious, hacker that he is, of course he used an unpublished API to bend Alexa, that’s the Echo’s personality, to his will. Video, because it happened: And look, Noel’s hack got picked… Read More
Update: I now “hacked” the API to control Hue Lights and initiate a phone call with Twilio. Check here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r58ERvxT0qM Last November Amazon announced a new kind of device. Part speaker, part personal assistant and it called it Amazon Echo. If you saw the announcement you might have also see their quirky infomercial. The parodies came… Read More
Reducing Friction with Amazon Prime Now
A couple days after Noel (@noelportugal) wrote about reducing user friction, I got a chance to try one of Amazon’s latest friction-reducing services, Amazon Prime Now. The likes of Webvan pioneered grocery delivery back in the dot com days, and fun fact, Amazon owns and continues to operate what is left of Webvan. In those halcyon… Read More
Another Echo Hack from Noel
Noel (@noelportugal) spent a lot of time during his holidays geeking out with his latest toy, Amazon Echo. Check out his initial review and his lights hack. For a guy whose name means Christmas, seems it was a logical leap to use Alexa to control his Christmas tree lights too. Let’s take a minute to shame Noel… Read More
From the first day I got the Amazon Echo in December 2014 I looked for more interesting ways to interact with it. Before the Alexa team released an official API, I came up with a rather creative way to control things . It was not perfect since I had to add things to the “todo” list… Read More
Introduction For the past 2 years I have been trying to raise awareness of the concept of Developer Experience (DX) both inside and outside Oracle. Over the next few days I will release a couple of blog posts delving deeper into this subject. This first post will concentrate on what DX is and why I feel it is… Read More
Working in an emerging technologies team has a lot of perks. One of them is to kick the tires of technologies that are about to become mainstream. It also has the somewhat fun privilege to gain interwebz bragging rights or the equivalent of the emblematic/annoying “first” comment that plagued the web forums just a few years… Read More
When tech media started proclaiming 2016 as the year of the bots, they seem to have nailed it. At Oracle we have at least three groups working on bots, OAUX included. One of the latest forays into bots was a Personal Assistant Technologies (PAT) hackathon, organized by Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team, open… Read More
ODTUG Kscope16
Just like last year, a few members (@jkuramot, @noelportugal, @YuhuaXie, Tony and myself) of @theappslab attended Kscope16 to run a Scavenger Hunt, speak and enjoy one of the premier events for Oracle developers. It was held in Chicago this time around, and here are my impressions. Since our Scavenger Hunt was quite a success the previous year, we were asked to run it again to spice up… Read More
Are you attending Kscope16? If so, you are in luck, @theappslab team will be back this year (by popular demand) to do a Scavenger Hunt. This year there are even more chances to win, plus check out these prizes: First place: DJI Phantom Drone Second place: Amazon Echo Third place: Raspberry Pi Our first scavenger hunt took place last… Read More
Editor’s note: We just returned from Holland last week where we attended AMIS 25, which was a wonderful show. One of the demos we showed was the Smart Office; Noel (@noelportugal) also gave a presentation on it. We’ve been showing the Smart Office since OOW last year, and it remains one of our most popular demos… Read More
The April That Was and Our Plans for May and June
Hi there, remember me? Wow, April was a busy month for us, and looking ahead, it’s getting busy again. Busy is good, and also good, is the emergence of new voices here at the ‘Lab. They’ve done a great job holding down the fort. Since my last post in late March, you’ve heard from Raymond… Read More
Samsung Developers Conference 2016: A Developer’s Perspective
Last week several of my colleagues and myself had the privilege of attending the Samsung Developers Conference (SDC) in San Francisco. It was the 5th time Samsung organized a developers conference in San Francisco but only the first time I attended, although some in our party were present previous times so I had some idea of what to… Read More
A Wonderful Week in Australia
2016 has been a whirlwind so far, and February kept up the pace. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been doing. As we did last year, OAUX made a trip to APAC again this year to meet partners, customers and Oracle people, show our Expo of goodies and talk simplicity-mobility-extensibility, Glance, Scan, Commit and our… Read More
OpenWorld 2015 Highlights
It’s been nearly three weeks, and I’m finally getting around to sharing the highlights of our OpenWorld 2015. Enjoy. Keynotes Last year, Steve Miranda showed some of our project work in his keynote. This year, our Glance framework on the Apple Watch, made an appearance in Larry Ellison’s first keynote in a video showcasing the evolution… Read More
After a very successful Scavenger Hunt at Kscope15, we are back with an Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne edition. This time we partnered with the Oracle Technology Network (@oracleotn) folks to give Oracle OpenWorld (@oracleopenworld) and JavaOne (@javaoneconf) attendees a fun experience, and with even more chances of winning. The OTN Community Quest was designed to be a win-win experience. We… Read More
Connect All the Things: An IoT Nerf Gun – Part 2: The Software
Introduction In the first part of this series, I showed you how to mod a Nerf gun so it can connect to the internet, and you can electronically trigger it. In this second part, I will show you some software I created to actually remotely control the Nerf gun over the internet using various input devices.… Read More
See the IoT Nerf Gun at JavaOne
So, Mark (@mvilrokx) built a internet-connected Nerf gun, so that happened. If you read here, you’ll have seen the early stages of the build. Heading into JavaOne (@javaoneconf), where he’ll be giving a talk, Mark wanted to build something cool to show. Look for a technical post from him soon. The short version is that he… Read More
Emerging Technologies and the ‘Glance, Scan, Commit’ Design Philosophy
Cross-posted from VoX. Behind the Oracle user experience goals of designing for simplicity, mobility, and extensibility is a core design philosophy guiding the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team’s work in emerging technologies: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” It nicely boils down a mountain of research and a design experience that shapes the concepts you can see from… Read More