AppsWorld 2014 SF

I have to say I was a bit underwhelmed by AppsWorld expo. I a few blocks away from Moscone and I am used to expos and conferences that shut Howard Street down for days. When we got there, I thought I was in the wrong place!

A lot of the exhibitors were more backend oriented (api devs, SEO and analytic based for advertising, etc), so there wasn't a ton of stuff for the "lay person". In fact, there were several booths that basically shooed me on when I responded that I was not a developer when asked.

A few things that excited me: WebOS is still alive! Palm diehards know and love WebOS. I was crushed when Palm was acquired by HP and then HP killed off Palm and WebOS. I was even more crushed when my Palm Pixi died and I had to switch to Android.

Well, WebOS is now a super sleek OS for LG televisions. It was pretty sweet and the menus and apps come up over live TV instead of going to a home menu. It's nothing life changing but it was a pretty intuitive system that alleviated the need for all the damn input channels on your TV for multiple devices.

I'll be honest with you, I am not a gamer. I have so much to do that I don't play Angry Birds or Robot Unicorn Whatever and the like. I checked out a few of the gaming booths. The most interesting, at least to me, was Electro-Pocalypse. I am an Art Education major. I have worked as an educator. I love the idea of teaching kids about electricity and circuitry through an interactive game. This would have been a fantastic tool at the after school I worked at because, well, I'm pretty sure the parents would have been really upset if I actually taught their kids circuitry (that's too dangerous!). The interface was fun and pretty easy to navigate.

I was REALLY disappointed in the booth that I had planned to check out, iCrea8. The premise is great: using photos to create 3D models for video games. But in all honesty, the execution was terrible. They have partnered with Autodesk, but it doesn't seem like they are using Autodesk's 123D Catch software (or if they are it's a really crude version of it).

I had really high hopes to develop this as a potential for 3D printing, but their models/characters look like a picture is pasted in place on the model. That won't actually work for what we do.

Sauce Labs had a small arduino/3D printed unit they used for testing/calibrating phones and that got me and the co-founder into a great discussion about 3D printing, especially when he said to me "wouldn't it be great if there was a place that had like a wall of 3D printers so you could get multiple things printed all at once?" He was pretty excited when I told him there was such a place! I think I spent the longest amount time at their booth even though I don't have apps that need testing. It was nice that he didn't blow me off because I'm not a developer.