Sam Coe's blog

We had a chance to connect with a number of mobile app developers at the local Meetup hosted by RaizLabs last night at Microsoft's NERD center in Cambridge.  There's clearly a buzz around Mobile app dev happening in Boston and I really like this city because it's compact and the developers who come to learn about the tech have become a tight group.  So tight, in fact that I was hit up by several folks after we demo'd our sample app and they all asked the same question: "I liked the demo, but what do you guys do?".

I'll take the hit for that because I've been demoing a sample app that showcases the capabilities of our Social Zone SDK for Android and iOS but eyes focus on the demo, not the technology behind it.  The lesson here is to focus on what the dev's care about most: time.  I know that mobile app developers can connect their games and apps to preferred social networks like Facebook, Tuenti, or Google+ to expand their product reach and improve discovery with a single line of code from our SDK, but the message got away from me and I’m seeing it in other demos (and webinars) too.

That's "my bad" for falling into an age old demo trap and a reminder to all that it's too easy to do.  We built a slick app to showcase capabilities of our SDK, but what we offer is a white label solution so the slick demo app is really irrelevant to developers.  Now, in answer to the folks who stopped me after DrinkOnTap last night and any others who have stayed up late to add a social graph to their apps, I'll just say this: "We provide social hooks for mobile apps, and you can pop that in with a single line of code. Bang. Done."

Add another line of code for presence detection, another for optimized messaging, and another to provide in-app recommendations for other apps your company provides.  Single lines of code that allow mobile app dev's to spend their time building better games and apps, not banging their heads doing user authentication and messaging to Facebook and similar social network APIs. As I said in my last blog, "let us do that". ...

You're reading this copy because it spilled out of my head, I popped it into a doc and pressed a few buttons that served it up for you in whatever device or medium you have handy.  Your car may be reading it to you as you drive, you may be scanning it on your phone on the metro, or at your desk as you sip your soup.  What's cool is that you no longer wonder or care what happened between my writing it and your uptake.  Someone, or something else is responsible to make sure the bits were posted, a network moved it, your device could find it and give it to you, and someone actually got paid to enable that process.

At our upcoming Hackathon in Boston, we'll be sharing a first glimpse of our Android SDK for mobile app developers who want to add social hooks to their apps and games.  Sure, some Android games can connect to your personal network of friends on Facebook now, but how does that happen?  What the players don't see or likely care about is how much time the app developers need to spend keeping their apps updated to take advantage of the back-end services that the social networks provide.  That's where Viximo shines.

By leveraging this newest SDK, mobile app developers can write their social network integrations once, and we'll take care of the heavy lifting and updates when they're ready to open their games up to the world of users on multiple social networks.  Heck, we'll even take care of native messaging, real time presence detection, recommendations and tracking requirements for those platforms too.  We've been doing it on the web for years, and now we're going mobile.  Learn more at the Hackathon and watch for detailed resources posted to the site coming soon.

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