tech

they are getting help, and it comes from within the community, including the new downtown Canvs shared workspace, designed to attract and nurture early startups like Salpeter’s. With the planned Creative Village project and a larger UCF satellite campus on the drawing board, government, educational institutions and leading businesses are taking a supporting role, with the stated goal of turning Orlando into one of the Southeast’s premier startup hubs. That suits Mark Salpeter just fine. “I really like Orlando,’’ he says.

It’s become much less painful to build gadgets, even for the little guy. Marc Barros, a co-founder of camera maker Contour, says retailers like Best Buy (BBY) might eat up $70 on a $200 device. In the age of social media and e-commerce, he can sell directly to consumers. If professional investors won’t risk their money on a hardware startup, entrepreneurs can turn to Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site and walk away with millions.

When there are 2144 members of the New York Drupal community, why was I the only woman in the room?* If we assume that the community mirrors the national average**, 25% of technology jobs are held by women. That would mean that there are 536 women in the group.

There were 45 people there last night
44/1608 or 2.73% of men attended the meetup
1/536 or 0.18% of women attended the meetup

Now, this issue isn't just about women* although that was the catalyst. The issue is about what seems to be a trend of homogeneity at NYCDUG meetings. This is bad. Diversity is good.

Very insightful & entertaining talk by @hmason + my biggest take-away (be curious & fail a lot)

it turns out that reusing paper is easier on the environment than recycling it, that’s probably why the folks at Tree Hugger are giving the un-printer some ink. “Wide use of this technology could have a huge impact,” they predict. “Reusing paper could reduce emissions by 50 to 80 percent over paper recycling.” Recycling involves trucking it to a plant for sorting, mixing it with water to make a slurry, and then spreading it with huge rollers to make “fresh” paper. All of this requires energy, which produces greenhouse gases.

Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. A durable 2.5" square provides WiFi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for months. A simple web app allows to you quickly set up your Twine with human-friendly rules — no programming needed. And if you're more adventurous, you can connect your own sensors and use HTTP to have Twine send data to your own app.

Video tutorials welcome students to Treehouse Island, where they arrive in a zeppelin, meet a mysterious, eye-patch-wearing ambassador (see photo above) – think Mister Rodgers transposed to “Lost” — and unravel mysteries while learning to code in HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript. The service went live in November and offers three beginner-oriented learning tracks: Web design, Web development, and iPhone/iPad application creation.