Today my boss asks me about mobile advertising, so I was going to show him my admob account after like 6 month of not logging in, due to low activities and not having time to update my "soundboard" apps, I just stopped checking my account.  I haven't gotten any notifce whats so ever, or maybe it just because I havn't updated their latest sdk, but at least give me a warning message or something...

Here it is.

Your account has been disabled for invalid activity or repeated policy violations. Some examples include recurring manual clicks or impressions, violation of our content policies which can be found here, robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as pay-to-click, pay-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we've taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information here.

I have not even logged into my admob account for 6 month, I have never made a single fraud click on admob, I don't even have the my "soundboard" apps with admob on my phone, And most important of all, I divert 50% of the ads as "in-house ads" to promote my other applicatiions.  I read through entire policy and could not find any violation of any of the apps I host out there, my ads are placed on top and my actions are always placed on bottom.  I am a little disappointed but at this point I really don't care due to the fact I have low activity rate on those apps anyway.  When I work on my new apps just to draw traffic, I am gona find some better ad network, admob proves to be very unprofessional.

So I've manage to build this new app using low level apis connecting with Twittter, it basically reads all the tweets coming from twitter.  When it reaches the phone's maximum CPU and memory capacity, it launches a new class I write called "Self Destruction", which just makes the phone explode.  This is available on iPhone, Android, WebOS and Windows Phone 7.  I am planning to open source this soon, so people can use these classes for other type of usage to protect against their information.

I already put a disclaimer on the app, I hold no legal in case of phone being malfunction after using this application

There are all these hypes about Honeycomb, I finally got sometime to play with the it.  After 3 minutes of booting, I got following screen.

And it literally took me more than 30 seconds to be able to just click "Force close".  After emulator being able to access the Operation System, all the commands seem to have a 5 to 10 seconds delay.  I am running this on a pretty fast computer, but programming on Honeycomb Emulator is virtually impossible.  I made a screen cast on the emulator shows as following.

This post is a little late since I haven't had much time blogging about it lately.  After request of making Apps for bunch of TEDx events, I've decided to open source iPhone and Android apps.  The database is still using Microsoft SQL Server 2008, once that's switched to Google Docs and becomes a more open platform I'll open source it as well.

Michael May has revamped the entire iPhone App which made the code a lot cleaner.

Folks at TEDxPSU is helping to polishing up the website which currently can be previewed at http://www.tedxapps.com

While working at my full time job at Catch.com, the team here were able to help me further improve the app which turned into unofficial TED App for TED2011 on both iPhone and Android.  After few weeks of hard work, we were able to push them into the market for TED2011 attendees.  You can search for "TED2011" on iTune or Android Market to download the application.

Following TEDx events were part of the feature suggestion for the project

• TEDxTransmedia
• TEDxAsheville/TEDxNextGenerationAsheville
• TEDxOrlando
• TEDxFullerton
• TEDxAlcatraz
• TEDxBasqueCountry
• TEDxPSU
• TEDxDubai

Source code for the project can be found on gitHub TEDx iPhone App TEDx Android App

If you need any help on these applications feel free to contact me.

Twitter has become very popular over past 2 years, mostly because its so open and everybody can have access to it.  So while rewriting Pickup Sports for Android, I thought it would be nice for users to tweet about their games.  But over few hours of googling it has become harder than I thought, majority of the API guides are out there are focusing on how to access Twitter itself through different of authentication methods.  All I want was for users to tweet about something very simple, and the only guides I was able to find was the ones integrating with TwitDroid, that wasn't even Twitter's official app.

So I write this little open source script for those who wants to integrate their android app with twitter app, and when twitter isn't installed it will automatically searching for TwitDroid through intent

https://github.com/Nyceane/Twitter-Android-Integrator

I'll write an example on how to use it next time.

It all started with an email from Snaptic for an invitation for "Move Your App" Challenge, I was working on some other android application at the time so I decided to just turn that in.

At the very same time, me, my co-worker Jonathan Pennington, Delfin, Michael and John decided to play basketball the week after.  A week has passed, everybody except me and John bailed out at the last minute, and we didn't even have a ball, nor there are anybody playing at the park.  Feeling frustration about finding the game, I've decided to make a seperate app about it to enter the challenge.  Since it is a problem I am trying to solve myself. 

Pickup Sports is about finding a casually assembled, spontenous game of any sports, it promotes physical, mental as well as social wellness of a person, the application allows you to keep a record of how much sport you've played, and it gives you extra gimmik for using phone's accelerometer for warming up.  The core of the application is to make it easy to understand just like how normal pickup sports are being played.

I've completed the Pickup Sports within 10 days, drove up the San Francisco on a Wednesday night after work, only to find out I've won the grand prize for "Move Your App" Challenge.  It was very surprising since it was very competitive, there were a lot of amazing applications that spent a lot more time and being more refined.  I am very honored to win the award and will try my best to expand the product.

On the very same weekend (memorial day weekend) I've managed to crank out the WebOS version of the application, and the iPhone version should be released in next couple of days before I go to TED.  During the period I've also registered http://www.ipickupsports.com, as well as a kid version located at http://www.earnthestars.com, the basics of web portion should be out in next couple of days as well.

After messing with Android SDK for a while, I've decided to release a simple app, which is Fantasy Chat.  I've been getting a lot of emails asking the app to be more dirty, so I think I have some explanation to do.

When I first discovered IRC, I was amazed by how these AIs were able to respond back and forth, so I've been always watching this technology, but because of lack of funding and exposure, these bots are simply "chat bots" that helps people in IRC channel.  So I think this is a great technology but heavily under used.

So I downloaded the AliceBot from http://alice.pandorabots.com/ and host it on the server, this way people can have some interesting conversation and possibly bring more exposure to this under used technology.  It isn't really meant to be dirty, it was meant to have some fun conversations.  Another thing is the original source AIML files includes scripts which tells users that the system is logging the chats, that is not true, its just doing that by default.  This was just an application for me to get comfortable with the SDK.

I was interested in android development ever since first Iphone came out.  I've tried to program in android ever since the first SDK was released, but lack of an actual phone and hard usability of the sdk has prevented me getting into it.  When I received my first Motorola Droid that's running under Android 2.0, it gives me the ability to actually get serious about programming mobile device.

The phones that came before Motorola Droid are simply not ready, you can not even call functions without a listener before 1.6.  2.0 and 2.2 provided huge upgrade in terms of easy programing and easy management.  I'll import some of my experience form my previous blog and you guys can see the blocks I've stumbled upon. 

The biggest innovation of these new generation smart phones are geo location coordinate, that is something people are having a hard time to determine on computer or laptop, so my first focus was to make an application that uses that feature.