Vasilis (tzikis) Georgitzikis

WebFWD is Mozilla's startup accelerator, focusing on open source startups that build products and solutions which move the web forward, by creating new standards and protocols, providing open alternatives to the existing walled gardens, and creating revolutionary new open platforms. WebFWD helps startups with innovative open ideas go from idea to product, and from good to great. As a member of the current WebFWD teams (and a WebFWD alumni by FOSDEM), I would like to show people exactly how WebFWD can help them get their idea off the ground and build a successful web app that benefits the open web.

codebender is an open-source online IDE for Arduino developers, makers and engineers, which incorporates most of the advanced development tools you would expect in a traditional IDE and brings them to the Arduino. On top of being a very strong and easy to use alternative to the Arduino IDE, codebender also offers a number of collaboration tools, like cloning a project and sharing code and ideas between your team and other developers. We will show you how it works, and how you can use it to increase your productivity and share your work with the world.

PMH is a home automation system built from the ground up to be easy to use, modular and as open as possible. Our software and hardware are completely open source, with source code, schematics and CAD files available online. PMH consists of 3 layers. The hardware layer, the überdust layer and the apps. In the hardware layer, we use a wireless sensor network with sensor nodes and actuators that communicate with each other using the low-power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and with a computer that acts as the main controller. The wireless sensor network consists mostly of Arduino nodes which control lighting, heating/air conditioning and electrical devices while at the same time using sensors to measure things like power consumption, temperature, light, movement, air quality etc. Überdust is responsible to bridge the other two layers by capturing and saving the data from the WSN to a central database, and provide easy to use interfaces (i.e. REST, Web Sockets) to the application layer. This way, applications can get sensor values from the wireless sensor nodes, and control the nodes accordingly. In the application layer, we have developed a web and smartphone application that gives users the ability to remotely control the system, view the current status of the various sensors and set automated behaviors such as turning on the lights when there are people in the room, sending a notification to the user's smartphone when someone enters your room, turning on the water boiler on predefined times, etc. Last but not least, due to the modular and open source nature of our system, its easy to add additional data providers in the hardware layer, such as an arduino with additional sensors, or even your computer and smartphone (i.e. your smartphone's accelerometer, the status of your server). It's just as easy to develop your own apps using our APIs, and extend the capabilities of the system to meet your own needs (remote controlled BBQ anyone?)

The Growl Project, started in 2004, is the de facto open source notification framework for Mac OS X, and it's currently used by a wide range of applications, such as Firefox, Chrome, Adium, Skype, Dropbox etc. In this talk, we will present Growl, the various Growl Extras, and the GNTP protocol used to send and receive notifications locally or over the network.

We would like to present a brief history of Growl, as well the current state of the framework that handles notifications. We will also present the Growl Extras, applications developed by the Growl Team which use Growl to notify the user on various events (GrowlTunes, HardwareGrowler, GrowlSafari, Capster), and how easy it is to use the Growl framework to notify your users in your own applications. We will also discuss the GNTP protocol, which is used to send and receive Growl notifications locally or over the network. GNTP is platform-agnostic, and there are already GNTP-compatible Growl alternatives for Windows and Linux. Thanks to the variety of bindings, it is easy to send Growl notifications between computers and any GNTP-compatible device. Last but not least, we will briefly discuss the recent decision to use Apple's marketplace as a revenue stream in order to sustain the continued development of the growl project and the expansion of our efforts, without sacrificing our open source nature.