Editor’s Note: Noel did it! After competing in 2013 and 2014, he broke through and won a prize at the annual AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon (@attdeveloper). Congrats to the whole team. This year, Anthony (@anthonyslai), Raymond, Osvaldo (@vaini11a), Luis (@lsgaleana), Tony and I (@noelportugal) participated in the AT&T Developer Summit & Hackathon. From the beginning… Read More
Author: Noel Portugal
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
This year some of us at the AppsLab attended the Samsung Developer Conference aka #SDC2014. Last year it was Samsung’s first attempt and we were also there. The quality and caliber of presentations increased tenfold from last year. Frankly, Samsung is doing it really hard to resist to join their ecosystem. Here are some of… Read More
Editorial Note: This is a guest post by friend of the ‘Lab and colleague DJ Ursal. Also be sure to check out our Hackathon entry here: EchoUser (@EchoUser), in partnership with SpaceGAMBIT, Maui Makers, the Minor Planet Center, NASA, the SETI Institute, and Further by Design, hosted an Asteroid Hackathon. The event was in response to… Read More
A couple weeks ago Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), Bill Kraus, Raymond Xie and I participated in the Asteroid Hackathon hosted by @EchoUser. The main focus was “to engage astronomers, other space nerds, and the general public, with information, not just data.” As you might already know, we here at the AppsLab, are big fans of Hackathons as… Read More
About a month ago, hackaday.com broke the news of a new Wifi chip called ESP8266 that costs about $5. This wireless system on a chip (SoC) took all the IoT heads (including me) by surprise. Until now if you wanted to integrate wifi to any DIY project you had to use more expensive solutions. To put this into… Read More
For the past year at the AppsLab we have been exploring the possibilities of advanced user interactions using BLE beacons. A couple days ago, Google (unofficially) announced that one of their Chrome teams is working on what I’m calling the gBeacon. They are calling it the Physical Web. This is how they describe it: “The… Read More
The OTN network is designed to help Oracle users with community generated resources. Every year the OTN team organizes worldwide tours that allow local users to learn from subject matter experts in all things Oracle. For the past few years the UX team has been participating in the OTN Latin America Tour as well as other… Read More
Remote Presence Devices or RPDs are finally becoming mainstream with products such as the Beam from Suitable Technologies. Today I kicked the tires of one (virtually of course) thanks to friend of the lab Dan Kildahl. I toured the newly renovated marketing offices at Oracle HQ. My first impression was really good. Around family and friends I am… Read More
If you haven’t talk to me IRL for the past 10 months, then I haven’t pestered you about the wonders of BLE and micro-location. My love affair with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons became clear when I heard at WWDC 2013 that Apple was implementing BLE beacon detection in their CoreLocation framework. Apple showed how… Read More
Hackathons are a great way to stay up to date on the latest technologies as well as for keep your coding chops fresh. At the beginning of this month Anthony Lai, Raymond Xie, Mark Vilrokx (honorary AppsLab member) and I participated in the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon. The event was held at Palms Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. The Internet of… Read More
Our maker extraordinaire, Noel (@noelportugal), has posted an Instructables on how he made the Flying Monkey Smart Target we showed at OpenWorld 2012 during the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. So if you want to make your very own smart target or are just curious, check it out, and he also produced a short video of… Read More
Since the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge I have been pretty pumped about the integration possibilities. After every conference I found myself with a bunch of business cards and no time to formally collect data. Recently I found CardMunch from Linkedin, an app that allows you to snap a picture of the business card and… Read More
Editor’s Note: Here are Noel’s (@noelportugal) adventures on the OTN Latin America Tour reposted from the WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) blog. Enjoy. I was very fortunate to meet Patañjali Venkatacharya during Kscope 2012 in San Antonio. He is a Chief Evangelist & Architect from the Application User Experience Team. Patañjali’s session highlighted all the work his team… Read More
I love photography. A few days ago I was talking to friend of the lab Tim Hall (aka @oraclebase) and he was telling me how frustrating was to go home after a trip and see some of the generic/boring pictures he took. My advice was to focus on details. Most of my favorites pictures come… Read More
This year for our Kscope (ODTUG) session Jake and I decided to make things a bit more exciting and show a fun way to use OSN REST API. The attendees played Rock’em Sock’em Robots using their phones. At the end of our session the attendees were given a phone number to text or call to… Read More
Hello. My name is Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) and this is my first official post on the theappslab. I’m an avid fan of all things connected to the Internet (aka the internet of things) and love hacking and tinkering away in my free time. This year I decided to join other folks in a social Christmas… Read More