Mozilla Development Round 3

A little post announcement celebration

Ok, so we were awarded again in the MozillaIgnite contest. This time, $20k, which is simply awesome. I've been so excited about this project, and knew that we were doing well, but it has all of a sudden gained much more momentum and attention than I had ever really imagined. Quite amazing for a group of friends who met at a hackathon six months ago....

Here was my pitch, please disregard the smart-ass opening comment:

Team Update:

So now we're focused on business. I've hired two additional people to work on this project. The first is a local code wizard by the name of Craig Tanis. Big surprise here: another simcenter student. Craig has an extensive background in programming and is acutally an adjunct professor at UTC in Computer Science. Craig will be working the web front end, primarily webGL. Also recently hired is James McNut. James received an MS in education a year ago from UT and did teaching rotations in the Chattanooga area with a heavy emphasis on STEM education. His job is  coordination between team engage3D and the local community in further defining our use case, finding a venue, and locating the ideal audience. James has an undergraduate degree in physics, and he has already proven to be invaluable to the team in the one week that he has been here.

Coding, Coding, Coding

Wrapping up weekend #1

We're camping out at co.lab most every weekend throughout the remainder of round 3. There really is little room for error on this, I feel as if we simply must deliver. We are so grateful for Company Lab's support and the use of their facilities, the least that we can do hold up our end of the deal.

We've identified a new framework that we'll be using on the back end, OpenFrameworks. This is a very powerful platform with many great features out of the box, and plenty of addons to keep any developer busy. It seems to be a staple technology to many artists and designers in the video space, we feel as if we have struck gold. It will not only help organize the structure of our code, but it gives us a common foundation between all the OS's we are managing between developers. (Not everyone has a mac unfortunately!)

Use Cases

We are in the process of pursuing relationships with roughly half a dozen different academic organizations for piloting our work. Details will be posted once we get some firm commitments! This project has gained a lot of attention since this last award and people are coming out in droves to support us. Chattanooga rocks.

Partners (look here as we add more to the list)

• Chattanooga Public Library
• Company Lab

Potential Partners

• PLAY program at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab