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I had the privilege of participating in Startup Bus 2019 on the Florida Bus — and the team I was on, Hyve, made the top three! Here are Hyve’s official videos from our adventure…

Meet Team Hyve!

In addition to the pitch competition that took place in clear view, there was also a behind-the-scenes game in which all the Startup Bus teams could partake. The game was made up of activities that teams would perform for points, and the bus that earned the most points would receive special mention at the finals. The activities were effectively a checklist for teams to follow as they created their startups and applications on their buses.

One of the activities was to make a team video, where team members would introduce themselves and explain why they’re participating in Startup Bus. We recorded this on Wednesday night at NC State in Raleigh.

Pitching Hyve to a stranger

Another action item in the behind-the-scenes game was to pitch our idea to a stranger in one of the towns where we stopped. We pitched the Hyve concept to the Lyft driver who took us from NC State to our hotel. Here’s how it went…

Practicing our pitch

In addition to building the business and the app on the bus, we practiced out pitches at regular intervals. Here’s Tracy practicing his pitch as the bus raced towards New Orleans:

The qualifying round

The qualifying rounds took place on Saturday, July 27th at New Orleans’ Propeller Incubator, where all the teams from all the buses — the Advancing Black Entrepreneurs, Florida, Mexico, New York, Ohio, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC teams — made their pitches.

Every member of every team had to be ready to pitch, because in the qualifying round, the judges chose two people from each team to make their pitch, one at a time. They tend to choose the least confident-looking team members, and a couple of them already knew me. We did well, though, with Rina doing the “set ’em up” pitch and Tracy doing the “finish ’em off” one:

The finals

We’d have to wait until the next day to find out who made it to the semifinals, but we were among them! Even better, we made it to the finals. We re-worked our pitch for the finals judges with the help of the Florida Bus Conductors — Akira Mitchell, Nick Price, and Shane Needham — and here’s the result:

The winners

Once all the finalists made their pitches, the judges sequestered themselves, and shortly afterwards, they made their announcements, which included Hyve!

Just the bit about Hyve

Just because I love that bit about walking the line between good and evil, here’s just the part about Hyve:

Beginning ARKit video course (RayWenderlich.com, April 2019)

Beginning ARKit is a video course offered at the premier mobile development tutorial site, RayWenderlich.com. It introduces iOS developers to building augmented reality apps for iOS with Apple’s ARKit library. In 41 bite-sized videos spanning 2 hours and 22 minutes, I take you from the AR version of Hello, World! and show you how to build:

1. Happy AR Painter: A Bob Ross-themed AR painting app that lets the user “paint” in 3D space using geometric shapes that can be animated.
2. Raykea: A version of the popular IKEA Place app that not only lets you place AR furniture in the room you’re in, but also draws posters on vertical surfaces.
3. BaedekAR: An AR guidebook, or Baedeker, for paintings and photos in galleries, museums, or any place that displays 2D art. It does this using ARKit’s ability to recognize and detect known 2D objects.
4. Into the Third Dimension: In which we take the BaedekAR app and turn it into an app that can recognize and detect known 3D objects.

Not only did I narrate the videos, but I created the script, and all the code and most of the graphics for the course.

The course is available only to RayWenderlich.com subscribers, but some excerpts have been made available for online preview. I’ve included them below:

ARKit workshop and Getting started with ARKit tutorial (RWDevCon conference, April 2018)

RWDevCon 2018 was a mobile development tutorial conference covering iOS and Android development held from April 5th through 7th, 2018 in Alexandria, Virginia. I was the only speaker to have two sessions:

• A four-hour pre-conference workshop on ARKit, and
• A two-hour introductory tutorial on ARKit.

These sessions were the two highest-rated ones at the conference, based on attendee feedback forms. It was this feedback that got me an offer to create the Beginning ARKit video course.

The four-hour conference is available only to RayWenderlich.com subscribers, but the two-hour tutorial was made freely available online and shown above.

Augmented Reality UX presentation (Tampa Bay UX, June 2018)

Based on the success of the ARKit sessions at RwDevCon 2018, I did a presentation at a Meetup of the combined Tampa Bay User Experience / Front-End Design Meetup with my wife, Anitra Pavka. We talked about build good user experiences for augmented reality, using both commercial applications as well as the applications I made for the RwDevCon presentations.

The slides from our presentation are below:

Tech editor on ARKit by Tutorials, first and second editions (2018 and 2019)

I was a tech editor on the first and second editions of the RayWenderlich.com book ARKit by Tutorials, and am currently tech editing the third edition, due for release this fall.

Augmented Reality in Android with Google’s Face API (July 2017)

My AR portfolio isn’t limited to just iOS — I also have an article on Android AR: Augmented Reality in Android with Google’s Face API, a tutorial in which I show readers how to build Snapchat-style filters that draw comic images over detected faces.

Would you like to know more about my augmented reality work? Feel free to contact me at joey@joeydevilla.com.

In case you hadn’t yet heard, I’m on a Startup Bus team, Hyve. We built an anti-email abuse system that uses virtual disposable email addresses (DEAs) — in three days, and on a bus.

Hyve is based on a long-standing email security principle: use different email addresses that are dedicated to single uses. The reason that most of us don’t do this is because it’s a cumbersome, painful process. Hyve automates the creation of virtual email intermediaries that you use to connect to or sign into services, and you can mute them if you need a little silence or delete them if you need to cut off spam, annoyances, or other email abuse.

You might be asking: “Does Hyve’s underlying principle actually work?” Don’t ask us — ask the security experts below.

Spoiler: YES.

Huffington Post: The Simple Email Trick that Identity Thieves Hate

Email is personally identifiable information — why are you using it as the way to identify yourself to parties who are likely to sell it? Don’t use your primary email address to log into services — create a secret one solely for that purpose.

Wallethacks: Why I Have a Secret “Classified” Email Address

The author’s use of different email addresses for different kinds of services is borrowed from a U.S. government security principle: use classified and unclassified systems, and keep them separate. This means creating separate email addresses for secure and sensitive purposes such as banking, and never using these addresses for anything other than their designated purpose.

Lifehacker: Use a Unique, Secure Email Address Solely for Password Recovery

When you click “I forgot my password” on a login screen, you’re often sent a password recovery link via email. With the prevalence — and profitability — of social engineering attacks, it makes sense to use an email address that nobody else knows.

Securosis blog: Consumer Security Tip – Use Multiple Email Accounts To Reduce Fraud And Spam

Lots of interesting ideas in this article. The main idea behind this article is to use different email addresses for different purposes, such as:

• An address for buying online when you don’t trust the store: Another Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail address you use for risky online purchases, and nothing else. That way, if a site you use is compromised you can easily change addresses without too much difficulty. These are the smaller online retailers you don’t really know or trust as much as Amazon and Ebay.
• An address for trusted retailers: This is your Amazon, Ebay, and Apple address- one you use to buy things from major retailers. This can be the same as your permanent address. Let’s be realistic, I use a few major retail sites and have never had any problems with spam or fraud by letting them use my main address. Yes, it’s a risk if they get breached, but it’s one I’m willing to take for a small group of stores I use more frequently. If you do this, make sure you opt out of any of their marketing emails. This is in your account preferences when you log in.
• An address for email subscriptions: This is for newsletters, fora, and other sites where your email might not be private.

Sign up for Hyve today!

Despite the fact that Hyve came into being over a three-day trip on a bus taking a zig-zag route through the southeast U.S., we have a working product that we’d love to have you try out! Come to our site, Hyve.email, and sign up for the cure to spam and other email bad actors.

Sometimes the best apps simply take a tried-and-true manual process, automate it, and make it easy to use. That’s the general idea behind Hyve, the project that I’m working with my team at Startup Bus 2019.

The general principle behind Hyve: disposable email addresses

Hyve is based on a tried-and-true technique known as disposable email addresses. It’s a pretty simple idea — instead of connecting to everyone using just one email address, you use a different email address for each contact or purpose. For example, you’d use one email address for Amazon, a different one for your bank, a different one for your friends, a different one for the newsletter you subscribe to, and so on.

The power of disposable email addresses is that if a contact gets too spammy, all you have to do is simply close or stop using the email account associated with them.

Some people create disposable email addresses by creating a whole new Gmail or Hotmail email account for each purpose, but that means managing a number of email logins and inboxes. This approach gets pretty unwieldy very quickly.

The better approach is to create virtual disposable email addresses. These are things that behave like email addresses, but forward email sent to them to your real email address. If you have access to your mail server and some technical skill, you can configure your own. For the rest of us, there are virtual disposable email address services, but most are difficult to use and pay almost no attention to user-friendliness.

Hyve makes it easy

Click the diagram to see it at full size.

Hyve gives you the power of disposable email addresses, but without the tedious mail server configuration work or user-unfriendly interfaces. With Hyve, you can create a new virtual email address in seconds, and then use it to connect to whatever you want: an online store, a subscription service, or even a person.

Any email sent to one of your Hyve email addresses gets sent to your real email address. Hyve is a true double-blind system, which means that you can also use a Hyve email address to send mail that appears to come from your virtual email address.

If you want to keep communicating with someone via Hyve, you don’t have to do anything. If you need a temporary break from someone who’s linked to you via Hyve, you can mute them. And if you need to never, ever again hear from someone connected to you via Hyve, just delete the virtual email address. You’ll never hear from them again, and they’ll won’t be able to reach you.

Sign up for Hyve today!

Despite the fact that Hyve came into being over a three-day trip on a bus taking a zig-zag route through the southeast U.S., we have a working product that we’d love to have you try out! Come to our site, Hyve.email, and sign up for the cure to spam and other email bad actors.

This is one of a series of articles leading up to the 10th annual Startup Busevent, which takes place from Wednesday, July 24 though Sunday, July 28th. I’ll be on the Florida Startup Bus, where I’ll be a hustler with a group that will spend three days on a bus, building a software, a business model, and a pitch, all of which we’ll present before a panel of judges in New Orleans! I hope these articles convince people to join Startup Bus, inspire the “Buspreneurs” who will be participating, and get the rest of you to find out more.

The Startup Buses depart tomorrow! I’m going to be on the Florida bus, which departs from Tampa and after taking a not-very-direct route, arrives in New Orleans on Friday, with the judging happening on Saturday. Here are the last of my pre-event notes on Startup Bus — watch this space as I post from the road!

The lesson from my last hackathon

Click the photo to see the original article.

My big lesson from my win at “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathon in March 2017: Simple and working beats complex and non-functional.

In 2017, GM (yes, the auto manufacturer) held “Makers Hustle Harder” hackathons in a handful of cities to see what people could build on their NGI in-car console systems. They held one of them in Tampa, and I offered to help a friend work on his app idea. I did that for most of the day, and with a couple of hours left, I came up with a goofy idea that I could whip up in very little time.

The app I put together was simple: it was a timer for the game classically known as the “Chinese Fire Drill”:

• Four people get in the car, close the doors, and someone starts the app.
• When everyone’s ready, someone in the front presses the app’s start button on the console touch screen.
• If any of the doors are open when the start button is pressed, the players will be told to close all the doors first (the game makes use of the car’s door sensors).
• If all the doors are closed when the start button is pressed, the game begins.
• Players exit the car, run around it once, return to their original seat, and close their doors.
• The game ends when all four doors are closed, at which point the time it took them to complete the drill is displayed.

The app wasn’t pretty, but that’s not what hackathons are about — they’re about working code in the time allotted. If you’d like to see the code, I’ve put it in a repo on my GitHub account.

An hour later, I had working code, an available vehicle, three other people to playtest the game with me, and two camera operators to record video of a test runs. We played the game twice, and we were giggling all the time. In the end, I won the “Judges’ Fetish” prize!

That lesson again: simple and working beats complex and non-functional.

Should non-coders join Startup Bus?

Yes, and if you don’t believe me, these links might help convince you:

• Harvard Business Review: Hackathons Aren’t Just for Coders
• Code Like a Girl: Hackathons: Coding optional, courage required.
• Cornell Tech: Hackathons Aren’t Just For Coders Anymore
• The C0de L1fe: Hackathons aren’t just for developers
• 18F: Hackathons: not just for folks who code
• Bringing the Hackathon Experience to the Non-Coder
• AT&T Developer Program: 5 Hackathon Roles That Have Nothing to Do with Coding
• Quora: How can a non-tech person participate in a hackathon?

How to brainstorm

A key part of hackathons is brainstorming. You may find these links helpful.

• Scott Berkun: How to run a brainstorming meeting and In defense of brainstorming
• Forbes: 4 Steps to Successful Brainstorming
• Zapier blog: Better Brainstorming: The Most Effective Ways to Generate More Ideas
• Fast Company: How to brainstorm like a Googler
• Hubspot blog: 15 Creative Exercises That Are Better Than Brainstorming
• BDC Canada: How to organize a successful brainstorming session
• UX Collective: Three Brainstorming Techniques for Designers
• Inc.: Here’s How to Be a Master of Brainstorming

 

 

Click the image to see it at full size.

Citations:

• Linus Torvalds: “I don’t like debuggers. Never have, probably never will.”
• Guido van Rossum: “…often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective.”
• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin: Debuggers a re wasteful timesink.

Found in a tweet by Katerina Borodina, found via Bernie Marger.