51Degrees.mobi provides a portfolio of technologies that extend an organisation’s existing online skills and investment to work on mobile devices as well. It delivers cost-effective, risk-free device detection, web optimisation and mobile analytics solutions enabling developers to maximise the customer’s experience of using a smaller screen. With over 25 years’ management expertise in developing and managing mobile web services, 51Degrees.mobi is used by 10,000s of websites and supports over 180 million devices visits every month. The company is headquartered in the UK and also has offices in India.

OTA12 Programme – Friday @ 12:15

James Roswell of 51degrees.mobi will be presenting the workshop Adaptive Mobile Design with a Server Side Flavour on Friday at 12:15 in the Music Room in the Mansion.

1. Reminder of the macro and micro level challenges of mobile web development.
2. Review of customer usage context and test scenarios.
3. Live code demonstration of 51Degrees.mobi PHP, .NET and optimisation solutions.
4. Tips on how to develop reliable adaptive design solutions, quickly with minimal risk, to support all types of device.

 3 bottles of wine will be given away to the first three people to follow along and complete the .NET/PHP installation with us

51degrees.mobi introduces simple mobile device detection for PHP developers

51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has expanded its portfolio to include PHP. The PHP scripting language is powerful and flexible, making it a popular choice for web site developers. Around a third of all websites currently use PHP.

This means even more developers and site owners can now discover whether the visiting device is a tablet, whether it’s a smart phone, what the screen size is – and they can then adjust the online content accordingly.

Unlike other device detection solutions, 51Degrees.mobi does not require cloud services or external plug-ins and is free for commercial use.

There are just four straightforward implementation steps:

1: Download the file, which is available as a free beta via http://51Degrees.mobi/php or by searching sourceforge.net or github.com for 51Degrees.mobi.

2: Unzip the contents of the file into your PHP project folder.

3: Add a single line of code to your PHP file.

4: Discover what each device accessing your web site is (tablet, mobile, desktop, etc) and what it is capable of, enabling customised content and formatting to be applied to the resulting web page.

The 51Degrees.mobi PHP code is licensed under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0 and is supported by a ‘freemium’ business model, which means there’s no charge for basic device detection – even for commercial use!

This new self-contained 51Degrees.mobi for PHP solution means developers can start using mobile device detection within three minutes.

51Degrees.mobi for PHP is being released as a beta, giving developers the ability to offer feedback that shapes the final product. Plug-ins will be available for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and CodeIgniter, with others planned for the future. The Premium version of device data will also offer the option of automatic updates when new handsets are released.

James Rosewell, CEO of 51Degrees.mobi, said “It’s never been easier to add mobile device detection to a web site. Our four steps take less than three minutes to implement: simply download, unzip, include and go mobile!”

Cloud services introduce an unnecessary additional complexity and, ultimately, offer a poor technical solution for any web site requiring device detection. The new beta version of 51Degrees.mobi for PHP demonstrates how it’s possible to detect mobile devices quickly, efficiently and – with our Lite product – for free. The result is a better experience for web site owners and for their online visitors. If you’re a web site owner, tell your developer to visit http://51degrees.mobi/php and let them show you how easy it is to get started.

Introduction

Learning is a large part of what happens at Bletchley Park. Visitors may not realise that our extensive education department welcomes schools, colleges and universities nearly every day. In our dedicated facility young people have the opportunity to learn about the history of cryptography, from the Caesar (or ‘shift’) Cipher through to today’s dual-key asymmetric techniques that we use every day of our lives, often without realising it.

As more and more children have access to smartphones and tablets, we have an opportunity to follow-up on these sessions with apps. Additionally, using mobile apps as an education medium means we can reach others that are not part of the education programme. Often a visit to Bletchley Park can be a little technical for the younger visitors. Sure they enjoy the toy museum and the model railways but often the ‘codes’ can go right over their heads. Wouldn’t it be great if we could appeal to them more at their level and help explain how codes and ciphers were used to keep secrets.

The Challenge

So, here’s what I’d like to see:
Devise a solution whereby one or more users can send ‘secret’ messages to each other using a dedicated BP-themed app. The cipher employed should be simple enough to be explainable and demonstrable to the user. For instance, a Caesar cipher (shifting the alphabet n places to the left or right) is simple to understand yet an effective cipher.

• A form of communication network will be required. Use email or devise your own service as appropriate.
• A user should be able to set the parameters for the cipher (as required by the cipher used) and encrypt a message
• The message should be transmittable to another user
• The recipient should be able to ‘guess’ the settings or the message content (or partial content – think Hangman) but not be told them, so if the sender wishes, they can reveal the setting or message.

The previous year has seen a groundswell of interest and support for the notion that this generation of young people and the next should be equipped with finer digital knowledge. That they should be given the opportunity to create and build digital stuff, as well as use it. A part of this is learning how to code, to programme the increasingly digital world around them.

There are many ways that kids can learn how to code nowadays, plenty of free tutorials online, and schools are just beginning to make room in the day to include this in the curriculum. But it is ever more about learning through discovery, a bit like the Montessori method for the older child! Learning how to build mobile apps, and hopefully become rich and famous, is obviously a great self-motivator for many young people to get to grips with HTML5 or a variety of platforms and languages and is often a starting point, especially for the teen programmers starting for the first time.

Yet it is as much about learning on your own or through playing with SDKs and APIs as it is about the community, seeing what other people are doing, peer-to-peer learning and experience is critical, and not available in most schools… yet.

This is where events like Over the Air and Young Rewired State play such a great role. This year #OTA12 is implicit in its welcome for the younger programmer, not that they have to hive off somewhere separate and do their own thing, rather an encouragement for them to come along and join in with everything.

I can vouch for the fact that you learn a huge amount at a hack event, it is the most incredible environment for challenging yourself, racing against time and then showing off what you have done – so I would call any of the younger coders to pack up their kit and head over to Over the Air, you will love it, learn a lot and make some lifetime friendships and discover some fabulous mentors.

Of course after Over the Air has run, if you have caugh the bug, you can join in with Young Rewried State and the festival of code in August. Let the Summer of geekly fun begin!

Emma Mulqueeny

Back in 2007 a gang of us got together from the BBC and Yahoo! and brought Hack Days from the States to the UK. The event was called Hack07 and there was a great deal of talk about how we’d create a space that was comfy, informal and easily reconfigurable. The answer, rather obviously, was beanbags. So off I set… I toured the worlds manufacturing facilities at great expense to the public purse (this was the BBC after all) and eventually settled on a company called greatbeanbags.com (it took literally seconds of googling).  They’re based up Nottingham way and are responsible for the now iconic Hack Day Bean Bag – the wedgie.

These bags have become a tradition at Hack Days that I’ve helped organise – especially the big ones. At every event we order about 100 of the things, print a logo on the front, chose the loudest colours and then… we give them away at the end of the event. The great thing about the bags is that apart from being all the useful things I’ve already alluded to – they’re also cheaper than hiring a pile of boring furniture that would make our Hack Days look and feel like a corporate conference.

Photo by mmorr on flickr

So here’s the thing – this year we’ve not yet quite got to our sponsorship goal so are still short enough money to buy bean bags – we’ve never not had bean bags and it’s a terrific opportunity for an amazing company to come in, pop their logo on a 100 bags and be the hero of the event. They’re properly cool, people get to keep them, they’re useful and even more importantly – it’s a damn site funkier than a stand!

So what do you say? Know someone who can help us? Point them in our direction and drop me an email…

Welcome to the first ever Chatbot Battles!

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your ringside seats and welcome to the first ever series of Chatbot Battles. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Chatbot owners from all over the world enter their creations for a knockout league to determine the winner. Each competitor must play each other in a league with the top entrants battling out in a one-on-one dual. Last bot standing wins!

Each match sees both chatbots either being asked the same 5 questions or having a free flowing conversation for 5 minutes. The winner is decided from their responses.

• Deadline to enter your chatbot: 1 June 2012
• League stage from: 11 June 2012 to: 25 June 2012
• Knockout stages start from: 26 June 2012 to: 11 July 2012
• Final result should be announced in July 2012

All bots are welcome to enter and test themselves against others, whether they be web based, downloadble, chatroom bots or even Android apps, sorry but we are unable to test iPhone apps – unless you want to send an iPhone along with your entry :-)

Chatbot Battles are open to various kinds of chatterbots – Website Bots, Downloadable Bots, Chatroom Bots and Android apps – written in any programming language. Your bot only needs to be available so people can talk with it. Botmasters are invited to enter their bot and do battle with opponents from all over the world.

The Details:

Rules for entering are:

• Only English speaking chatterbots are allowed to enter.
• Only one chatterbot per person. This means you can’t enter different versions of the same bot.
• Clones – you are free to enter any AIML, Personality Forge, MyCybertwin, INF.net bots and any other type of bot. However, if during a match, two bots produce exactly the same answer, neither will score a point for that question. This is to stop clones that have had no extra work carried out on them. The only exception to this rule is if the original bot (A.L.I.C.E., Ultra Hal etc) enters the contest. In this case, it will be awarded the point whereas the clone will score zero.
• Accessibility – your bot must be easily accessible to the judges.
• We can not accept bots that are only available on CD ROM. They have to be available to download on the internet.
• We can not accept bots that require the judges to download a 3rd party chat program such as Mirc. Most instant messenger bots such as AOL are okay to enter.
• We can not accept bots that require additional downloads of various programs that are not already install on Windows XP unless they are relatively small and easy to install.
• We can not accept bots that are not online 24/7. With judges being from all over the world and in different time zones it’s not possible to schedule a time for judging.
• If you are running some type of blocking filter on your bot to prevent user abuse it must be removed during judging or you must provide a method where the judge can re-establish contact instantly. If the judge can not complete the conversation, your bot will score 0 points for that match. Seeing how a bot reacts to foul language or abuse maybe a part of the judging process.
• In short you are responsible to provide the judges with a bot that is easy to access or install.
• There must be a way for the judges to copy and paste the output from each bot. This is especially important in speech-only bots. It is time consuming to judge any contest such as this and helping the judges to accurately record the responses is appreciated.
• Bots created on Android apps are permitted to enter. These apps must be either free to download or a copy of the paid version must be accessible to us, either without us having to pay or by reimbursing us for the cost. Unfortuately, we have no way of testing Iphone apps. In the case of a phone app, it is not necessary to provide a way to copy the output but the bot’s responses must be visible on-screen and not just spoken.

Contest Calendar:
Deadline to Enter: June 1, 2012
League Stage: June 11, 2012 to June 25 2012
Knockout stages: June 26, 2012 to July 11, 2012
Announcement of Winners: July 2012

Prizes and Awards:
Unfortunately, as I have no sponsor and am not rolling in money, I can only offer the kudos of beating your peers as a prize and maybe a T-shirt, mousemat or similar gift. If anybody is interested in sponsoring the contest, please contact me.

Judges:
The judges will be selected from the general public to determine the winners in the contest. None of the judges will have a bot in the contest to ensure fairness. The judges will be totally impartial and fair to all entries regardless of the bot type or the owner. The judges will each be allocated matches to oversee and will be free to ask the bots anything they wish. If during a match, the bot asks the judge a question, the judge must answer it unless this goes to more than three questions in a row. Such tactics will be classed as stalling and the judge is then free to proceed to the next question without answering the bot.

Judging – League Matches:
A league match will either consist of a question and answer session or a free flowing conversation.

Question and answer match:
Each judge will pose the same five questions to the two competitors in each match and will score a point to the bot who in their opinion, gave the better answer for each question. Each question will be spelled and phrased exactly the same way to ensure that each bot gets an equal chance. At the end of the match, the points will be tallied up to find a winner. The maximum score in each match will be 5-0. All judge’s decisions are final.

Free flowing conversation match:
The judges will talk with both bots in the match for 5 minutes each. Any and all subjects may be covered. The judge will allow himself to follow the lead of the bot when necessary and will not be deliberately obtuse with the bots. Judges will be aware of the current state of AI and will converse accordingly. After the end of the match, the judge will decide which of the two bots gave the more convincing conversation and mark each bot out of 5. The chatbots are NOT expected to believe they are human. We are looking for the ability to chat not to try and fool the judges.

Judging – Knockouts:
The knockout stages will be judged as above but with 10 questions to each bot. This will continue until the semi-finals when there will be 15 questions. The losing semi-finalists will play an extra match with 15 questions to determine 3rd and 4th positions.

Questions:
1) The questions may contain typos to test the bot and internet slang terms like “lol” may also be used.
2) The questions will not be trivia like but reasonable in that an average person would be able to answer them. For example: “Who was Michael Jackson?” is good. “What is the population of Russia?” is bad.
3) As this is an international contest, the questions will not favour any particular country. For example asking a question about a certain country that only the people of that country would know. An example of this is “Who is the President of Finland?”.
4) Mathematical, logic, memory and reasoning questions may be employed. Examples of such questions are, “What is 6-2?”, “Can I eat a building?”, “I have a blue shirt. What colour is my shirt?”, “Joe and Jim are twins. Joe is 24 years old, how old is Jim?” and so on.
5) A question may just consist of a statement to see how a bot reacts in ordinary conversation rather than just being a question/answering program. An example of these are, “I went to the movies yesterday.”, “There is nothing on TV tonight.”
6) The questions will be posed in British English but if the judge deems a bot is having trouble understanding due to spelling, he/she may, at their discretion, pose the question in American English. An example is, “What is your favorite book?” instead of “What is your favourite book?”
7) Basically, anything goes. Each bot will be faced with the same input and so will face the same chance in each match as its opponent.

How the contest works:
Each entry in the competition is placed into a league table with at least three of the other entrants. The number of league tables and entrants in each will depend on the number of contestants. A typical league table will look like this:

Just like the soccer World Cup, each bot will play against another bot in its group until all the entrants in each group have played each other. A match will consist of 5 questions. Both bots will be asked each of these questions with the one who answers the best, in the judge’s opinion, being awarded a point. If the answers are the same from each bot for anything except a general knowledge or a yes/no question, as they may be for A.L.I.C.E clones for example, no points will be awarded for that question. A typical match would go as follows:

Question 1: What is your name?
Bot 1: My name is Bot 1.
Bot 2: I do not know your name.
(Bot 1 scores a point for giving a correct answer. Score so far: 1-0)

Question 2: Do you like steak?
Bot 1: I like ice cream.
Bot 2: I like books.
(Bot 1 scores a point for giving a more relevant answer about food. Score so far: 2-0)

Question 3: What is a dog?
Bot 1: Dog: man’s best friend, a canine.
Bot 2: Dog: man’s best friend, a canine.
(No points scored. Although both bots were correct, they produced exactly the same response. The only exception to this rule would be if the original bot was taking part, as this is the original from which the clone was made. Score so far: 2-0)

Question 4: Jack is taller than Jim. Is Jim taller than Jack?
Bot 1: Who is that?
Bot 2: I do not know.
(Both bots got it wrong and so no points scored. Score so far: 2-0)

Question 5: What is the capital of France?
Bot 1: Paris.
Bot 2: Paris.
(Although they gave the same response, it was a general knowledge question and so both bots score a point. Final score: 3-1)

As in a soccer league table, 3 points are awarded for a win, 1 for a tie and 0 for a loss. The final result of the above match was 3-1 to Bot 1 and so that entry would score 3 points for winning the match. Bot 2 lost and receives no points.

These matches continue until everyone in each group has played each of the other members in the same group. The final table would then look something like this:

The top two from each league table then go on to the knockout stages. The higest scoring runners up may also be included in the knockout stages if the numbers are not a power of 2 (4,8,16,32 etc). In the event of a tie, the number of points scored in all matches will be taken into consideration. If there is still a tie, the number of points conceded will be counted and if by some reason there is still a tie after that, the tieing bots will play a match between themselves to decide a winner.

The knockout stages continue in the same style as above but each match consists of 15 questions instead of 5. The winner will progress to the next knockout stage while the loser is out of the contest. In the event of a tie, further questions will be asked until one bot falters. Once the contest gets down to the final four, 15 questions will be asked in each round. The knockout matches will follow this style:

There will also be a 3rd and 4th place play-off between the losing semi-finalists with 15 questions. The whole process should take around 1 month depending on the number of contestants but this time frame may increase or decrease.

Note:
The rules and guidelines may be changed at anytime to ensure fairness. It is impossible to forsee all the events that may arise during the contest so Chatbot Battles may have to make amendments to the rules to ensure the smooth running of the contest.

The kind of person we are can be defined by what we do; the music we listen to, the places we go, the food we eat, the books we read, the interests we have. By integrating with the Open Graph, your app can help people express who they are through their Facebook Timeline by publishing the user’s activity in your app to Facebook in the form of Actions (verbs) and Objects (nouns).

Apps can define their own custom set of Actions and Objects which let users publish that their listening to songs, reading books, attending events, donating to charities, running a route, visiting a city, that they love an author or have cooked a recipe… These actions appear on a user’s Timeline and, because Actions and Objects are structured data, they can be aggregated in interesting ways – not just the songs I listen to, by my favorite artists. Not just the recipes I cook, but my favourite chefs, restaurants, or cuisines.

Actions can be published from any platform: web, mobile web, iOS or Android native – even apps on OS X, Windows or Linux. The Actions your app publishes not only appear on a user’s Timeline, but in Ticker and Newsfeed for their Friends to see which drives traffic to your app on whichever platforms you build for.

The Challenge

In 24 hours, build an iOS, Android or Mobile Web/HTML5 app which integrates with the Facebook Open Graph, and publishes Actions that help a user express their online identity through what they do.

Apps will be judged on:

• their usefulness and appeal
• their technical implementation and completeness
• the value of the resulting Aggregations and Feed Stories to a user’s friends

Inspiration

The best Open Graph apps come from applying Facebook’s platform to another data set – be it movies, recipes, books, songs, artists, locations, sports. We recommend you find a domain you’re interested in, and which you can get data for. Then model the data in terms of Objects, and link Objects together using References. Then think of the Actions that a user could take in your app, and which you’d like to see from your Friends in your Facebook NewsFeed.

Examples of successful mobile apps which have integrated with the Open Graph include:

• Spotify – publishes the songs people listen to, with timeline aggregations which show favorite Artists and Albums
• Pinterest – helping people organize and share great content from across the web
• Foodspotting – where foodies can share the dishes, restaurants and cuisine’s they love
• GoodReads – sharing the books people read, and helping people discover new authors and publishers from friends
• TripBirds – sharing travel plans and getting recommendations for places to go from your friends
• Pose – helping people share what they wear, their favourite designers and shops

Resources

• Integrating Facebook into an iOS App - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/mobile/ios/build/
• Integrating Facebook into an Android App - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/mobile/android/build/
• Integrating Facebook into a mobile web / HTML 5 app - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/mobile/web/
• Open Graph Tutorial - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/tutorial/
• Open Graph Sample Web and Mobile Web App - http://tinyurl.com/simonsfoodapp
• Authentication Guide – needed to be able to Publish Actions: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/

First mechanical computer or automatic computing engine concept

In 1822, Charles Babbage purposed and began developing the Difference Engine, considered to be the first automatic computing engine that was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making a hard copies of the results. Unfortunately, because of funding he was never able to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June of 1991, the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage’s birth and later completed the printing mechanism in 2000.

Later, in 1837 Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine contained anArithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), basic flow control, and integrated memoryand is the first general-purpose computer concept. Unfortunately, because of funding issues this computer was also never built while Charles Babbage’s was alive. In 1910, Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage’s youngest son was able to complete a portion of this machine and was able to perform basic calculations.

First programmable computer

The Z1, originally created by Germany’s Konrad Zuse in his parents living room in 1936 to 1938 is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable (modern) computer and really the first functional computer.

The first electric programmable computer

The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer and was developed by Tommy Flowers and first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

The first digital computer

Short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC started being developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937 and continued to be developed until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). The ABC was an electrical computer that used vacuum tubes for digital computation including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU. On October 19, 1973, the US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by Eckert and Mauchly was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer.

The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. Although the Judge ruled that the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional.

The first stored program computer

The early British computer known as the EDSAC is considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. The computer performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949 and was the computer that ran the first graphical computer game, nicknamed “Baby”.

The first computer company

The first computer company was the Electronic Controls Company and was founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the same individuals who helped create the ENIAC computer. The company was later renamed to EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and released a series of mainframe computers under the UNIVAC name.

First stored program computer

First delivered to the United States Government in 1950, the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101 is considered to be the first computer that was capable of storing and running a program from memory.

First commercial computer

In 1942, Konrad Zuse begin working on the Z4, which later became the first commercial computer after being sold to Eduard Stiefel a mathematician of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on July 12, 1950.

The first PC (IBM compatible) computer

On April 7, 1953 IBM publicly introduced the 701, its first electric computer and first mass produced computer. Later IBM introduced its first personal computer called the IBM PC in 1981. The computer was code named and still sometimes referred to as the Acorn and had a 8088processor, 16 KB of memory, which was expandable to 256 and utilizing MS-DOS.

The first computer with RAM

MIT introduces the Whirlwind machine on March 8, 1955, a revolutionary computer that was the first digital computer with magnetic core RAM and real-time graphics.

The first transistor computer

The TX-O (Transistorized Experimental computer) is the firsttransistorized computer to be demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.

The first minicomputer

In 1960, Digital Equipment Corporation released its first of many PDP computers the PDP-1.

The first mass-market PC

In 1968, Hewlett Packard began marketing the first mass-marketed PC, the HP 9100A.

The first workstation

Although it was never sold, the first workstation is considered to be the Xerox Alto, introduced in 1974. The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display, and mouse. The computer operated like many computers today utilizing windows, menusand icons as an interface to its operating system.

The first microprocessor

Intel introduces the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 on November 15, 1971.

The first personal computer

In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term “personal computer” when he introduced the Altair 8800. Although the first personal computer is considered by many to be the Kenback-1, which was first introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

The Micral is considered the be the first commercial non-assembly computer. The computer used the Intel 8008 processor and sold for $1,750 in 1973.

The first laptop or portable computer

The IBM 5100 is the first portable computer, which was released on September 1975. The computer weighed 55 pounds and had a five inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor, and 64KB of RAM. In the picture to the right, is an ad of the IBM 5100 taken from a November 1975 issue of Scientific America.

The first truly portable computer or laptop is considered to be theOsborne I, which was released on April 1981 and developed by Adam Osborne. The Osborne I was developed by Adam Osborne and weighed 24.5 pounds, had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4″ floppy drives, ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system, included amodem, and cost US$179.

The IBM PC Division (PCD) later released the IBM portable in 1984, it’s first portable computer that weighed in at 30 pounds. Later in 1986, IBM PCD announced it’s first laptop computer, the PC Convertible, weighing 12 pounds. Finally, in 1994, IBM introduced the IBM ThinkPad 775CD, the first notebook with an integrated CD-ROM.

The first Apple computer

Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple known as the Apple I computer in 1976.

The first PC clone

The Compaq Portable is considered to be the first PC clone and was release in March 1983 byCompaq. The Compaq Portable was 100% compatible with IBM computers and was capable of running any software developed for IBM computers.

• See the below other major computer companies first for other IBM compatible computers

The first multimedia computer

In 1992, Tandy Radio Shack becomes one of the first companies to release a computer based on the MPC standard with its introduction of the M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX computers.

Other major computer company firsts

Below is a listing of some of the major computers companies first computers.

Compaq - In March 1983, Compaq released its first computer and the first 100% IBM compatible computer the “Compaq Portable.”
Dell - In 1985, Dell introduced its first computer, the “Turbo PC.”
Hewlett Packard - In 1966, Hewlett Packard released its first general computer, the “HP-2115.”
NEC - In 1958, NEC builds its first computer the “NEAC 1101.”
Toshiba - In 1954, Toshiba introduces its first computer, the “TAC” digital computer.

Ariel is the Founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the creator of Science Hack Day  SF, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also the coordinator for Science Hack Days around the world, an interaction designer, and a research affiliate with Institute For The Future.

Additionally, she sits on the advisory board for the SETI Institute‘s science radio show Big Picture Science, is a contributor to the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, and is the founder of CupcakeCamp. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley. Previously, she was a CoLab Program Coordinator at NASA, a Digital Anthropologist at VML (a WPP agency), and a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget.

Enough Software will be giving away 400 hard copies of the Developer’s Guide to the Galaxy at OTA12 – we’ll announce the details of how you can pick your copy up at the event.

What a great plan: Publishing a non-commercial and free handbook about mobile technologies, invite the whole community to contribute and put out updates whenever the ecosystem’s changes make it necessary. By doing so, you will always have a nice (and useful!) give-away when your company exhibits at events, you gain visibility as multi-platform experts and you keep on expanding your network. Once you have some attention, it will be easy to find companies who are willing to sponsor the printing – even though they do not control what is written about their products: The big players know pretty well that they have to please developers and provide them with useful tools and information if they want them to develop for their platform, use their tools and/or distribution channels. A great plan indeed. But we never had that plan.

When we started putting out the first edition of our “Developer’s Guide To The Galaxy” at Mobile World Congress 2009, we simply did it because we realized that a lot of people were loosing the big picture in the fragmented and ever-changing mobile world. Back then it was a tiny brochure with 40 pages and I think the longest chapter spoke about J2ME. There never was a commercial idea or business plan behind this. It turned out that the demand was bigger than expected: We quickly ran out of copies, a lot of experts came up to us and offered their support as writers and a company offered some money to cover the printing costs of a re-print. So the second edition came out just some weeks later. It already had 60 pages.

Then Android gained traction and of course we needed to include that in the book, so we extended the content again and printed a third edition. And so it continued.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress we published the 10th edition. It has over 200 pages, 20 authors are involved and almost all the 5000 copies we printed are distributed already (of course we will hold back some boxes for OTA 2012!). Nokia, BlueVia, Immersion and Deutsche Telekom financed the printing this time. Our friends from WIP even published a companion guide which concentrates on app marketing.

It turned out once again that you do not need a detailed plan and stick to it, especially when things are changing as quickly as they do in our business. Just start something if you think it makes sense. If you keep following a good idea, you have a good chance that it will develop its own dynamics.

Download a digital copy:
Mobile Developer’s Guide To The Galaxy No. 10
Mobile Developer’s Guide To The Parallel Universe of App Marketing

23rd April – 29th April – London / New York / San Francisco / Sydney

Big Data Week is one of the world’s most unique global platforms, offering a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world across not only technology but also the commercial use cases for Big Data.

Big Data week was founded by @stewarttownsend on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon, being a co-organiser of four London based Big Data events he felt there was a gap between meetups across not just London but the globe, communities tended to stay in one part of the Big Data landscape and thus the idea was born to bring together all the communities and networks across a week of events, alongside his co-organiser @empiricator (Carlos) they have built a week of FREE community events that explores the core areas around Big Data these are

1. Data Scientists
2. Data Technologies
3. Data Visualization
4. Data Business

The week consists of a series of events across the globe with London hosting 8 of these and ending with a data hackathon which was born from the London meetup Data Science London this is a hackathon over 24 hours and spread across the globe from London to San Francisco and Sydney, with data scientists aiming to solve problems set on four large data sets with the end result accumulating in a overall winner to be announced at the end of the competition.

For a full list of events go to www.bigdataweek.com but we have Hilary Mason Chief Data Scientist at Bit.ly speaking at Data Science London on the Monday evening, Doug Cutting the Co- founder of Apache Hadoop foundation on a panel with Edd Dumbill Strata program chair as the moderator and the CTO from Moshi Monsters talking at Londata on Thursday about their growth and how data has been crucial to them.

If you want to attend or run your own events then go to www.bigdataweek.com for more information or contact@bigdataweek.com

Follow us on twitter @bigdataweek and use the hashtag #bigdataweek