Daniel Leuck's Blog (141)

Our Night Out with Heroku Japan & Friends

During our trip to Japan last month we got to enjoy an evening out with the Heroku team. We've enjoyed…

Aloha TechHuians,

I'm sending the March newsletter a few days early to make you aware of a number of interesting upcoming events as well as imminent committee votes on key bills that affect the Hawaii tech community.



Events



Unconferenz

March 2 from 8am-4pm at Windward Community…

We enter the new year with over 3,000 members, a full event schedule, a newly reinvigorated blog, active job boards and plenty of great discussion about everything from…

Should US and EU regulators step in to curb the search giant's influence? 

In one of the worst editorials on CNN this year…

Henk Rogers has launched a new Hawaii-based venture accelerator called Blue Startups focusing on capital-efficient and scalable-technology companies, including Internet, software, mobile, gaming and e-commerce. They are also interested in tech companies selling into Asian markets.

I'm excited to see Henk and friends making this sort of investment in our…

When Mika and I started Ikayzo seven years ago I got everything wrong. Because I enjoyed a good relationship with my previous two employers I was confident they would become my first customers. Surely I could easily sell to local companies as well. Although we were a new company, I had a solid software development resume and some experience with business development. I thought recruiting would be easy because we could offer the ability to do interesting work in paradise. I…

It was with a heavy heart that we gave notice to our friends at the Manoa Innovation Center yesterday. Its time for Ikayzo to graduate to a larger commercial space. We are excited about having a new office, but we will miss the MIC community and our corporate home tucked away in beautiful Manoa valley.

Ikayzo has been at the …

Aloha TechHuians,

Apologies for being a bit late this month. I just returned from New York and I'm prepping to leave for Tokyo in a couple days. I'm getting too old for this :-)

This month we had some excellent blog posts including:

• Security Wargaming: Capture the Flag by Dan Nishimura…

For the past week I've been experimenting with writing a Flex/WPF/Swing-like widget framework on top of HTML5 using Dart. Dart is what I've always wanted for client-side web programming. Its a class-based optionally typed programming language that is, in the words of Dart team member Lars Bak, "high performance,…

As I write this HB 2288, which requires anyone providing internet connectivity to keep detailed records of users' browsing history, is being…

Normally when we discuss user experience design on TechHui we are talking about web or mobile apps, but UX design is a much broader field. Wikipedia defines UXD as, "Creation of the architecture and interaction models that affect user experience of a device or system."

During my time in Japan over the past two weeks I've been struck by how much attention is paid to UX for everyday things ranging from…

Aloha TechHuians,

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou! I hope the holidays treated you well.

Many thanks to all the participants in last month's TechHui conference including the speakers, panelists, sponsors and organizers. It was a tough time of year to do a conference (my fault for being in NY and Tokyo on business during the usual time), but we pulled it off. This year I was overwhelmed with work and being a new dad so I…

Aloha TechHuians,



There are only a few more days to register for the TechHui conference happening on Dec. 10 at UH Manoa. The conference features everything from Garrett Lisi presenting his Geometric Theory of Everything to an …

It's TechHui Conference time! The goal of the conference is to highlight interesting Hawaiʻi-based people, projects and organizations working in technology and interactive design. We seek to facilitate education and networking within the Hawaiʻi tech and design communities as well as educate people about the latest developments and…

After initial failures in the Japanese market, Facebook and LinkedIn may have caught their second wind



For years US based social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have had very poor penetration in Japan despite having more features and better UX design than local competitors. Homegrown networks…

Yesterday I was asked to chair a committee on workforce development for the software industry in Hawaii. Our committee was specifically tasked with coming up with suggestions on how to bring the number of senior software developers in the workforce closer to meeting the demands of software companies in our state. The…

When I was in high school I read about research at the University of Hawaii in small scale self contained ecosystems. The idea fascinated me so I started doing research on how I could build one. In Des Moines, Iowa, where I lived, there is a small rain forest contained in a geodesic dome called the Des Moines Botanical Center. A scientist at the center helped me with a design for a miniature version of the center with the addition…

With Apple's new iTunes subscription feature publishers can publish their digital content via the App Store and collect a recurring subscription fee. Users can easily organize, browse and manage their subscriptions in one place. That sounds great until you hear about the cut Apple is taking: 30% for the…

I realize its sacrilegious to say anything bad about HTML5, but I have to say I am really disappointed in its handling of widgets (i.e. combo boxes, lists, sliders, etc.) HTML5 introduces new form input types such as range, date pickers, color selector, etc. but they are completely opaque and have very narrow APIs. This is due to HTML5's approach of punting to the browser to render and manage the widget. Often the browser in turn punts to the OS. This was the approach Java AWT took when it…