We’re hosting the December meeting for the Madison IGDA student group at our Sharendipity offices on December 3rd at 6:00pm. If you will be in or around Madison next week, please stop by and check out what this new student chapter is all about!
The following is the agenda they’ve listed on their flyer…
Come meet other local developers and DEMO YOUR WORK. We’ll be getting to know everyone and their areas of interest, discussing platforms, software and tools and generally having a good time. Food will be provided!
Check in with the Facebook Event to let the IGDA chapter know if you can make it. And feel free to share it with your friends!
We’re really excited to be the winners of the first Ning Appathon today. We won for the best “ported application” category and received a cool $4,000!
Ning had a pretty prestigious group judging the contest…
Submissions for our weeklong competition were judged by Wired Editor-in-chief and DIY Drones Network Creator Chris Anderson, Ning Chairman and Co-founder Marc Andreessen, and blogger and Managing Director of building43Robert Scoble. The competition began on Nov. 5 with all submissions due on Nov. 12. The entrants were judged on creativity, usability, how well they integrate with Ning Networks, viral features, and usefulness.
It’s more than just an app
One of things we’re most excited about is the transformation we went through as part of this project. This is much more than just a Ning app for us. After all, Ning users have long been able to post their Sharendipity creations inside Ning using the standard embed code.
When we decided to go after this prize, we set the bar very high. We wanted to syndicate the entire software development process. To provide a set of tools that let anyone run their own development site.
This will mean that a teacher can create a template that allows her students to develop their own interactive study guides. And a niche gaming network can run their own game creation contest. All from within their own website, blog, or Ning network.
We aimed to build one application that delivered the creation tools, community aggregation tools, and a means for individual users to interact with their own creations – all in a nice bundle and tightly integrated with the OpenSocial standard. We’re thrilled that Ning recognized us for this achievement!
There’s more to come!
The Ning community provides us with an awesome opportunity to explore niche, custom software development. We’re excited to see what kinds of applications they can create now that the barrier for software creation has been significantly lowered.
Over the next several weeks we’ll talk more about how our tools can be syndicated outside of sharendipity.com. And we’ll help the Ning users leverage our platform to do even more. We’d like to give them the tools to submit their own software to the Ning application directory.
We’re excited to share the news that the State of Wisconsin has approved our application for certification as a Qualified New Business Venture (QNBV)!
Through Governor Jim Doyle’s “Grow Wisconsin” initiative, angel and venture capital investors are eligible to receive tax credits for a portion of their investment in high-growth technology companies based in Wisconsin.
The QNBV designation is intended to make it more attractive for investors to take an equity stake in companies like ours. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about this program!
This week we announced a partnership with HarQen, a leading web telephony company, where HarQen will leverage the Sharendipity collaboration tools to enable its customers to build custom web applications that interface with the HarQen platform. In addition, HarQen will provide premium telephony components to Sharendipity customers through our component sharing architecture.
“Our vision is that HarQen will bring voice to the web across a wide range of diverse applications, and we know our customers will require tools to easily build custom web-based interfaces. Sharendipity helps us towards our goal of creating an ideal solution for businesses in the web-telephony space.”
- Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder and CEO of HarQen.
We’re really excited about this! Not only does it provide our customers with the ability to leverage an innovative technology inside their Sharendipity applications, but it gives us another opportunity to show off the depth of our tool set in a new niche. We’re looking forward to seeing what the HarQen customers are able to build.
We are really excited to announce the launch of our new game creation tools in Flash! As we’ve talked about manytimes before, we’ve been striving to improve your user experience within the browser. With Flash, you now have a seamless launching and syndication experience, plus a snazzy user interface!
The port of our browser player from Java to Flash went relatively quickly. However, in the case of the creation tools, we took the opportunity to step back, identify, and eliminate many of the points of friction that made it difficult to reuse components in the community.
We love reuse at Sharendipity. We think that is the key to making it easier for everyone to enjoy the process of creating and sharing interactive applications with their friends. And our new creation tool has taken huge strides toward making this a snap!
For example, you can display Flickr photographs on any object by simply dragging a Flickr feed component onto the object. You can incorporate the profile data of your Facebook friends into your games through multiple Facebook services. Perhaps more exciting is the ability to create templates from these user generated components. For example, the Scramble template provides a mechanism for anyone to customize their own photo scramble game. All of these elements are created by users in the community and shared without requiring the respective consumers to understand how the underlying objects are programmed.
If you’d like to build your own logic, we provide object oriented programming tools for you to use. Once you’re finished, you can share it with others in the community. Whether it is a set of actions, a game actor, a scoring system, a web service, or your own artwork.
To help celebrate this event and help you get acquainted with the creator, we’ll be hosting a game jam Tuesday, June 23rd at our Sharendipity offices from 5-11pm. If you can’t make it in person, please join us online through our Twitter account and we’ll work hard to support you remotely.
We believe in your creativity so come join the fun and show off your talents today! We are in the process of turning over the tutorials and wiki to match the new tools. If you need anything feel free to contact us through our Get Satisfaction page!
We’re excited to be hosting this month’s IGDA chapter meeting in Madison. It will be held on May 19th at 7:00pm at our downtown office.
In addition to some chapter announcements, we’ll talk a bit about our technology and do a quick demo. Ray Ratelis of Guild Software will also be giving a talk on designing and building games for mobile platforms. Afterwords, the party will move to one of the local watering holes around the square.
Sharendipity is really excited to be presenting at the Game Developer’s Conference this year. We are teaming up with some of the other vendors building game creation communities to talk about our respective experiences. It is part of the Worlds In Motion Summit on Monday and Tuesday. Here are the details:
Date/Time: Monday (March 23, 2009) 5:00pm — 6:00pm Location (room): Room 132, North Hall Experience Level: All Track: Worlds in Motion Summit Format: 60-minuteLecture
As we started talking about a month ago, we made the decision to port the Sharendipity platform to Flash. We’re really excited to announce that the Flash version of our game player is officially released!
There has been some great discussion both on this blog as well as otherplaces about the decision we made. Now that we’ve made it here, we love it. It opens up so many possibilities for you as players and developers.
Syndicating games is a snap. Just add the embed code for any application you create.
Performance is smooth and consistent for every user playing the games.
Game creators not only get achievements, challenges, and high score management for free, but now you can easily add your great games to any number of other Flash gaming sites in addition to Facebook.
Games are even more portable then they were before. They’ll go everywhere Flash goes!
Our creation tools are still running via a Java applet for now. We’ll keep you posted on our progress as we make that transition. In the mean time, enjoy the new Flash player!
Exciting news this week… We have removed the restrictions to the editing tools. Now everyone that visits Sharendipity – either through Facebook or our portal – can edit any application or create a new one from scratch. Thank you to everyone that participated in our alpha program!
Technically, we’re still in a beta phase as we work through bugs and continue to iterate on the features and workflow. Nonetheless, this is a very exciting step for us, and we’re looking forward to seeing what all of you can create!
Wow! What a great day in the demo pit at TechCrunch50. It was a long and exhausting day, but we received some great feedback and saw a lot of enthusiasm for Sharendipity. Nearly everyone likes to play games, and they had even more fun as we built games right in front of them!
We’re hosting the December meeting for the Madison IGDA student group at our Sharendipity offices on December 3rd at 6:00pm. If you will be in or around Madison next week, please stop by and check out what this new student chapter is all about!
This week we announced a partnership with 
