Distilled

With the launch of Wit, a natural language toolkit for the internet of things, mobile app developers and interactivity designers are empowered to add voice commands to their product offerings. Soon, you'll be able to leverage all the power of your mobile device without ever touching it. Truly amazing!

Hold onto your hats! In this ghost episode, salvaged from what was left of the recording, Aubrey and Justin discuss the absolute nature of buy-in behavior. Focus your efforts on those who are excited about you and your product. This same thing applies to personal and professional situations. Fair weather friends and casual customers are not worth your time. Build Loyal Relationships.

Every year for the past several years, groups of eager entrepreneurs board buses, making their way to Austin, TX for SXSW. Along the way, they conceive, design, and build companies. When they arrive, all the teams pitch for prizes and glory. Justin recounts his hilarious, excellent, and tragic experience with Startup Bus Southeast this year.

In this technical episode, we discuss techniques for building apps with consistent design and interactivity across multiple platforms. By designing skillfully at the interface level and structuring platform-specific implementations in namespaced folders, we can standardize behavior with minimal code replication.

Justin schools Aubrey on how to balance risk against client satisfaction using fixed price contracts. Weigh the pros and cons of both sides, we come to an objective understanding of why fixed price is the clear winner in most situations.

Sometimes, we build features. Other times, we build products. Occasionally, we build businesses. Anyone who takes on any of these endeavors would be wise to know when a feature is really a product and when a product is really a business. We explore some of the various scenarios you might find yourself in along the way. Hopefully, we help you avoid the pitfalls, too.

Aubrey sits down with Ron Ben-Zeev, CEO of World Housing Solution to discuss their temporary housing product. Using composite materials, modular construction, and a distributed manufacturing strategy, Ron and his team enable disaster response organizations and military to reduce cost of deploying reusable short-term structures to those in need all over the world.

Aubrey walks Justin through the inner workings of OAuth. If you're looking to integrate OAuth into your existing system or want to know how to leverage OAuth for authentication and authorization in your API, this is for you. We also discuss concurrently supporting web and native mobile clients.

Failure is something we face regularly in life. Whether we accept it or not, we are destined to fail on our way to success. In this episode, we embrace the experience and learn how to identify good failures, those that inspire us to grow. We also offer some possible solutions that might have a significant impact on our individual ability to prevent failure using assistive technology.

This week, we discuss the subtleties of the social and personal significance of various social media actions, such as like, favorite, and retweet/share. What seems simple on the surface may be quite a bit more complex.