Announcing Photo Hack Day NYC!

On the tail of our recent acquisition by Adobe, we're so excited to announce that registration is open for our sixth Photo Hack Day, this time back in our hometown of NYC! Adobe aims to enable developer creativity, and participants of PHDNYC will have the opportunity to get a hands on look at the Adobe Creative SDK and create amazing hacks with Sponsor APIs. We’re making this a more intimate event, focused on our terrific community of developers and users. 

More details below:

Who: Our friends, old and new, in the photo space
What: Another full weekend of photo-centric awesomeness!
When: December 6-7th, 2014
Where: Aviary HQ in NYC

Check out the event site for more details and a link to register!

Photo Hack Day Japan Recap

On February 22-23rd, Aviary brought the 5th Photo Hack Day all the way around the globe to beautiful Tokyo, Japan. This year’s event was hosted by our good friends at Mixi with help from our amazing sponsors: Mixi, Shutterstock, gettyimages, 500px, Leap Motion, Amazon, Mashup9, Recruit, Imagga, EyeEm, Pux, XLoudia, Sendgrid, Zenrin, FlashFoto and Adobe.

We kicked the weekend off right with a pre-party Friday night, sponsored by our friends at Shutterstock. The excitement was palpable as Japanese hackers and API sponsors mingled and plotted, preparing for the main event.

Saturday was opened up with a keynote address by Shutterstock, followed by a round of API presentations by our generous sponsors, Japanese and Western alike. Any language barriers were broken down by a team of incredible translators from our friends at Mixi. Big shoutouts to Nozomi Yamawaki and Vishal Nayak!

The next 24 hours were a blur as more than 120 hackers, sponsors, and translators turned copious amounts of fried rice, sushi, beer, chuhai, and green tea into 23 inspiring hacks!

Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness originality, and overall real-world value of the application.

And now…the winners!

1st Place: Back to the Future (300,000 JYP)

Team: Theeraphol Wattanavekin, Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, Thiti Luang

Back to the Future is a visual learning app that allows you to "walk through time” via an interactive interface. It utilizes a Leap Motion controller to simulate moving through history and reveals the visual evolution of people, places and things over the course of time. You can try the app here.

2nd Place: Before The Filter (200,000 JYP)

Team: Benjamin Watanabe, Antony Tran

Before the filter is an Android app that teaches would-be photographers the fundamentals of Photography. It introduces the user to a variety of topics, including composition, techniques for taking food photos, landscape photos, and even selfies. It also provides "training wheels" in the form of grid and template overlays in a custom camera interface to teach the user about proper composition. After a photo is taken with the app, it provides tips for editing the photo (using the Aviary SDK) based on the style of photography the user is in the process of learning. Finally, the user can share their before and after photos to show their progress. Most impressive, the hack is already available for download in the Google Play store. Check it out yourself.

Additional congratulations to Benjamin and Antony for winning Best Use of Aviary’s API!

3rd Place: VOCA Getty (100,000 JYP)

Team: Atsushi Onoda, Hiroshi Kanamura, Shinichi Segawa, Yasushi Takemoto

VOCA Getty is an innovative photo dictionary app that uses images sourced from Getty Images to help users learn a language visually.

The judges also came out with 2 honorable mentions that received Lomography cameras from our good friends at Sendgrid! Congratulations to Yabu Kiyohide (薮 キヨヒデ) and Yuya Matsuo (松尾勇也) for Na･Gu･Ri･A･I and Akira Muramatsu for Smile Motion!

Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Rick Martin (Writer/Editor, The Bridge), Tobias Peggs (CEO, Aviary), Wyatt Jenkins (VP of Product, Shutterstock), Naoki Sadakuni (Country Manager, Pinterest Japan), and Takafumi Nanao (Technical Consultant, Mixi) for overcoming the challenges of whittling down 23 amazing English and Japanese hacks to just 3!

For a complete list of API and Event prizes, check out the PHDJapan Winners list, and for a list of all of the hacks presented, take a look at the PHDJapan Submissions list. For more photos of the event, search for the #PHDJapan tag on Twitter. We’ll be adding some of our favorites to the Photo Hack Day Facebook page.

Congrats again to all of our winners, and thank you to our amazing sponsors who contributed more than $15,000 in cash and prizes! We had a ton of fun at PHDJapan, and we hope to see you at the next one!

Cheers,

Photo Hack Day Team

Kon'nichiwa from Photo Hack Day Japan!

Kon'nichiwa from Tokyo!

Six of us from Aviary HQ in NYC are happy hacking in Tokyo this weekend - as we host Photo Hack Day Japan.

This is our 5th Photo Hack Day - and our first international event. We’re running the event in partnership with our good friends from Mixi, one of Japan’s largest social networks (and a long-time Aviary SDK partner).

It’s about time we took Photo Hack Day international. Last year 600 Billion photos were taken by people all around the world. And many of those were taken, and edited, and shared thanks to apps and apis and services made by people at his hackathon. Over 100 people are at the event, either hacking on new apps or offering developers help with their APIs – including folks from Shutterstock, Getty, EyeEm, 500px, Amazon, SendGrid, LeapMotion, Pinterest and more.

We are all part of an incredible global community of developers that are all obsessed with photos. Bringing that community together is why Aviary started Photo Hack Day in the first place. Japan is more obsessed with photos than anywhere else on the planet - so Tokyo is the perfect place to host our first international event. 

The idea is simple: to bring like-minded people together - to have fun for a weekend, to experiment, to hack, and to invent new ways to for people to create, edit, share and communicate with photos. As I tap out this blog post, I can see some really cool apps being created in every corner of the room. We’ll post the list of winners once the judging has happened later today.

- Tobias 

Announcing Photo Hack Day Japan!

We're excited to announce that registration is open for Photo Hack Day Japan! This year's Photo Hack Day is a collaboration with our good friends at Mixi and will be hosted at their headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. More details below:

Who: Our friends, old and new, in the photo space
What: Another full weekend of photo-centric awesomeness!
When: February 22-23rd, 2014
Where: Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

This year's PHD promises to be an exciting event with more than $15k in prizes, and a ton of amazing API's and Sponsors:

mixi
Shutterstock 
500px
GettyImages
LeapMotion
Amazon
Mashup Awards 9
Recruit 
Imagga
EyeEm
SendGrid
Xloudia TV
Pux
Adobe
Zenrin Datacom

Sign up for the event here: http://photohackdayjapan.peatix.com/

Testing in iOS at Aviary!

Last week, Aviary was fortunate enough to have the New York iOS Developer Meetup take stage at our headquarters for an awesome two hour discussion about testing in iOS.  

The event, organized by Meetup founder Larry Legend (@larrylegend), featured a demonstration on Aviary integration by Aviary's lead evangelist Ari Fuchs (@arifuchs), a discussion on tools and strategies for test driven development by Justin Martin (@JustinMartinM) and Joe Burgess (@jmburges), and a presentation by Mark Dorison (@markdorison) about his experience setting up a build server for automated testing with Xcode Server.

The event was a huge success, with about 200 attendees packing the room, taking notes while mowing down on pizza and beer.  Definitely looking forward to our next developer event, an iPhone / Objective C Workshop put on by the First iPhone App NYC Workshop Meetup, on January 29th and 30th!

Speaker Mark Dorison sits front and center of a great audience

Larry Legend kicks off the event

Justin Martin and Joe Burgess discuss TDD and Jenga

Aviary's Lead Evangelist, Ari Fuchs, demonstrates the simplicity and awesomeness of Aviary integration

Interested in hosting your tech meetup at Aviary HQ? Email events@aviary.com.

Want to join a team that loves giving back to the NYC tech community?  We're hiring!

Aviary and Mixi bring Photo Hack Day to Japan!

After four super successful Photo Hack Days, Aviary is bringing the fun across the globe to our friends in Japan! Co-hosted by Mixi, PHD5 will unite talented developers and designers in the Tokyo area to build amazing applications using web and mobile APIs.

Who: All of our design and dev friends in the photo space

What: An exciting, weekend-long coding marathon!

When: February 21-23, 2014

Where: Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

Why: Showcase your mad skills and creativity with APIs in front of hundreds of top developers and designers. Also, teams will compete for a chance to win big prize money, tech gear and the wonderment of your startup peers!

From NYC to San Francisco, our four sold-out Photo Hack Days have brought in over 1500 developers and designers as well as more than 250 hacks. The result? Some pretty incredible projects, like last year’s winner, Letsgo.io (http://letsgo.io/). The Letsgo.io team created a cool website for travelers that shows photos of all the sights they’ll see on an upcoming trip. It’s a great way to visually map out a trip - and it was just one of the many hacks that were impressively original, creative, functional and visually stunning.

We are beyond excited to bring Photo Hack Day 5 to Japan and can’t wait to see the results!  

Read more about the event in Mixi's official release.

For more information, including sponsorship opportunities, contact phd@aviary.com

Aviary Photo Hack Day 4 at Facebook HQ

Panel L to R: Brett Wayn (Flickr), Jack Levin (ImageShack), Flo Meissner (EyeEm), Liyan Chang (FilePicker.io), and moderator Avi Muchnick (Aviary) at PHD4.

Panel L to R: Jim Heiser (Adobe), Kristen Berman (Lytro), Lucas Buick (Hipstamatic), and Dirk Stoop (Facebook) at PHD3.

Startup Bus Accelerate at Aviary

At Aviary, we love being involved in the vibrant and growing NYC tech startup scene. This November, we hosted Startup Bus Accelerate, a kickoff event for the North East Startup Bus team.  If you're unfamiliar, Startup Bus is a mobile hackathon in the most literal sense -- teams take buses from various cities throughout North America and hack all the way to SXSW.  It's a fun, exhilarating event that flowers ingenuity and teamwork.

This kickoff event, organized by North East bus leaders Nate Cooper and Alice Ng, brought together all star developers, designers, and hustlers to network, share past glories, and contemplate future challenges.  The event featured speeches by Aviary's lead API Evangelist, Ari Fuchs, as well as several Startup Bus veterans.

Aviary's Ari Fuchs shows off our growing partner list.

Organizer Nate Cooper keeps the crowd under control :)

Good luck to the Startup Bus team! Applications are open now!

Interested in hosting a tech event with Aviary? Email partners@aviary.com.

Want to work for a tech company that loves the tech community? We're hiring.

Aviary Community Meetup #1: iOS7 Features and Design Patterns for Developers!

We've formed an Aviary Community Meetup group to help share our passion with other developers and designers.  Our first event focused on helping developers and designers make the most of iOS7.  

You can find the slides from both presentations on slideshare below:

http://www.slideshare.net/aviary/refreshing-your-app-in-ios-7
http://www.slideshare.net/aviary/transitioning-your-app-for-ios7

We'll be doing more of these events in the future, so we'd love to hear your feedback on the kinds of events/topics you'd like to see from Aviary.

Aviary's Lead API Engineer and Head Evangelist, Ari Fuchs, kicks off our first community event.

Creative Director Andrew Rudmann explains his iOS7 design philosophies.

iOS Engineer Michael Vitrano gives a behind-the-scenes look at our iOS7 update. 

Interested in attending future events? Join  Aviary Community Meetup  to stay updated.

Want to be a leader in the web and mobile photography space?  We're currently hiring! Check out our openings here. 

Aviary at Mobile Photo Connect - Come and join us!

It goes without saying that mobile photography has completely revolutionized the way we both capture and share photos. Less than three years ago cameras on cell phones were still a novelty. Now, mobile photography is the main event at the launch of any hot new smartphone - from Apple to Android.

This rapid growth makes the race for the “next big thing” in MoPho even more competitive for developers. At Aviary, we love our developer friends and want to make sure they’re ahead in this race, which is why we’re beyond excited for our own Co-founder and Chief of Product, Avi Muchnick to join Darren Johnson (Kodak Alaris’ Chief Growth Officer) to share best practices for smart, simple MoPho API integration through a talk, “Weeding through the API Jungle” at Mobile Photo Connect October 15.

As an opening event to GigaOm Mobilize, Mobile Photo Connect is a solid day-long conference that will focus on how mobile photography is disrupting and revolutionizing the way we capture, share and experience photos. It’s a great chance for us mobile app developers to get cross-inspiration from others in the photography space, such as Samsung, Nokia, Kodak, Nero, Fujifilm, HP and Adobe. A brilliant idea (if we do say so ourselves) by event co-hosts Hans Hartman, president of Suite 48 Analytics and Alexis Gerard, founder of Future Image Inc.

Overall, there is a sweet line-up of MoPho topics. Here a few that we’re particularly pumped about:

• The world of mobile photography in 2013 and beyond - a discussion with mobile photography journalists and analysts on what’s trending in the industry.

• The connected camera perspective - what should we expect as the gap between cameras and smartphones continues to narrow?

• Monetization options for photo apps - How to make money. Enough said.

We want to invite our Aviary community (here’s looking at you developers!) to take part in this conference and receive a special discount of $100 off regular attendance from our friends at Mobile Photo Connect. Redeem here: http://mobilephotoconnect.eventbrite.com/?discount=aviary

Get the rest of the story at www.mobilephotoconnect.com.

Hope to see you there!

Aviary Events: iOS7 Features and Design Paradigms for Developers

As many of you know, the team at Aviary has spent the last few months knee deep in an iOS7 redesign for our popular Photo Editor by Aviary. We’ve learned a ton of lessons and best practices along the way that we want to give back to the developer community.

To that end, we’ll be hosting an event next Tuesday (Sept 24th) at Aviary HQ in NYC where you can come hear about how we handled the transition of our Photo Editor SDK (which powers over 5000 applications reaching 65 million users), and standalone app (Photo Editor by Aviary, which has retained its spot in the top 5 Photo & Video apps since it launched last year).

Have an app of your own? Bring it! We’ll also be doing Q&A for developers who are looking for advice on updating their own applications for iOS7.

Register for the event below:

http://aviary-ios7.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!