three crazy weeks

The past few weeks have been very intense, here's basically what went down in chronological order :

* Hit by reduction in force layoffs at my day job.
* Panic a bit.
* Furiously begin searching for a new job.
* After two weeks, find and accept another job with a solid company.
* Meet another local Android developer (Rylan Barnes / GoCart).
* Investor offers to fund Rylan and myself if we join forces in a new entity.
* Panic some more.
* Gracelessly back out of new day job two days before I'm supposed to start.
* We get the new company (Big in Japan) up and running in record time.
* Today, GoCart and TuneWiki BOTH place top 10 in ADC round 2. OMG!

So that's the quick-quick-quick version of what I've been doing and why I haven't been posting here much. It looks like it's all going to end up quite well, at least, I'm very happy at the moment.

All my existing mobile projects (SocialTones and Geomata) are being transferred to the new business (Big In Japan), and will hopefully live on. However, the future of this particular blog remains uncertain. Future posts from me will most likely be on the Big In Japan blog.

This entrepreneur is well on his way to building a real company, thanks very much for joining me on my adventure.

I have to give thanks to my wife Ksenia, for putting up with all my off hours development, to Alexander Muse, for supporting us and believing in our potential, to Ryan Roberts, our lawyer who got the paperwork done so quickly, and Rylan Barnes for all his hard work on GoCart, it's a phenomenal application.

TuneWiki on TechCrunch

TechCrunch has done a very flattering profile on TuneWiki.

Why do I care? Because I've been doing some consulting work for them since early July to help with their round 2 effort for the Android Developer Challenge. I've had a lot of fun working with Zach Hobbs and Chad Kouse on this project, and I'm very proud of how far the app has come in these few short months.

My work was primarily on the mapping functionality. Zach originally pinged me because of the map experience I had from Geomata. The map stuff in TuneWiki is much more advanced than what I originally implemented for Geomata, although you can be assured that I'll be beefing up Geomata's map interface quite a bit before the next release.

And of course, my favorite part of the article:

"Perhaps most exciting is TuneWiki’s integration with location services. Because the player can optionally tell TuneWiki’s servers what song you’re listening to, it can offer an interactive map that displays musical tastes across the world."

Here's the video demo :

Developer Spotlight on Android Guys

Android Guys just profiled us in their developer spotlight series. Go check it out!