Maps are one of the oldest and most powerful forms of visualization. Lately I’ve been learning how to make my own maps using open source data and public APIs. I started by simply plotting locations on a world map. World maps in svg format are readily available on the web. Wikimedia Commons, for example, has… Read More
The OAUX Emerging Technologies team, or The AppsLab, researches technical innovations coming down the pipeline. Part of our goal is to assess the potential of the technology – is it easy to adopt? Are there use cases that might make work easier for enterprise employees to complete their tasks? Oracle invests in such research because it helps determine… Read More
How do we imagine and build a solution for the future that screams, I want to live in a future where this thing exists and is used by people. Recently, the Appslab Team attended the Future Summit SF where we learned how we could better design and build experiences for the future. We saw an… Read More
Kscope17 is just around the corner and it is not a secret that we love ODTUG‘s Kscope since it is a conference geared towards Oracle Developers. This year as we have done in previous years, we worked closely with the conference organizers to bring a unique fun experience. We developed an Augmented Reality game called Kscope GO.… Read More
Ten years ago, Paul posted a brief introduction to our team and our mission. He, Rich and I embarked on this journey in March 2007, soon to be joined by Anthony, and none of expected to be around as a team for more than 18 months max. But, here we are a decade later, having moved… Read More
Introduction Another Maker Faire has come and gone, the 12th one already. Unlike last year, Oracle had a booth again at the Maker Faire, staffed by my colleagues and myself throughout the weekend, where we showed of some fun demos. Here are some impressions, both from reactions in our booth and from the grounds. The… Read More
Introduction In the first part of this series I introduced the concept of Developer Experience and why I think it is important that we start investing more into improving the Developer Experience. In this part I will lay down some foundations on how this could be done. The pillars of DX Know your user (i.e. the developer)… 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
In my previous entry, Fun with Facebook, I described how to pull data from Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, organize it using NodeBox, and turn it into representations of friends, posts, and the “likes” that connect them. Here is the final result: The above image is a snapshot of a high-resolution poster with many fine details.… Read More
I am often surprised by which of my Facebook posts are the most liked and by who likes what. I wondered: are there any interesting patterns there? Could I visualize them? My next question (as always) was: could I get the data? Thanks to the rise of the API economy I could. Companies have discovered… Read More
Raymond and I were fortunate to attend the Game Developers Conference this year. Compared to the previous year, the crowds were calmer and new sessions and summits were added to accommodate growing interests in VR and UX. This year there seemed to be more focus on delivering (a) Inclusive and Accessible experiences as well as (b)… Read More
The Oracle Code (@oracledevs) event series is going to 20 cities around the world, showcasing many Oracle Cloud Service offerings. The event at each city will have keynote sessions from various speakers, demo stations showing many of Oracle’s Cloud services, a code lounge for developers to check out some “hardware” linked and controlled through Oracle backend, and other partner booths.… Read More
Oracle Code (@oracledevs) begins tomorrow in San Francisco, and we’ll be there. What is Oracle Code? Check out the video, which includes our Gadget Lab at HQ, robot arm demo, VR egg chair and Tony O giving a tour. Specifically, Raymond (@yuhuaxie) and Mark (@mvilrokx) will be hosting IoT Workshops like they did during JavaOne and OpenWorld 2016.… Read More
Art of Making I caught up the making virus from our engineers, and, jointly with a fellow parent, volunteered to teach an “Art of Making” seminar at my daughter’s school (my friend’s son came up with the title). Our hope was to bring STEM, art, and design thinking together. (I am supposed to represent art… Read More
Blogging and long-form content seem so tedious to me nowadays, but if you’ve read here for a while, you’ll recall that I used to post several times a week. One of the reasons I’ve kept this blog running in the era of ever-shorter content is that it keeps a historical record of this team’s work and… Read More
Lots going on here at the ‘Lab as always, and now, I have video to prove it. First, a large of our daily routines now involve showing off our demos to visitor to the User Experience Cloud Labs at Oracle HQ. Our demos live in a space we affectionately call the Gadget Lab, and during… Read More
At the end of November, Laurie’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team organized another fabulous hackathon, this time in collaboration with the Oracle Sydney Office. The goal of the hackathon was to integrate several Oracle Cloud Services and hack together an application built on top of those Cloud Services, using a toy or other device. The AppsLab was… Read More
This past holiday break, I have mostly stayed in the garage – setting up a CNC machine and cutting all the things that I deemed cuttable by it. Owning a CNC machine has been on my list for a long time, it is just out of my price range for a high quality professional grade machine, or maybe… 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
A few weeks before the first ever Oracle sponsored Maker Faire, I was experimenting with some of the cognitive (vision) recognition APIs available. Google Vision API, Watson Visual Recognition and Microsoft Computer Vision API are some of the biggest players in this field right now. After testing all of them I found the idea of Microsoft’s CaptionBot really compelling:… Read More