All posts filed under: Blog

Free the Robots! Mein erstes Produkt für die Facebook Messenger Platform.

This is a repost of a note I originally published on my Facebook account on August 12th, 2016, in German language. Vielen Dank, dass du meinen Artikel geöffnet hast. Es würde mir viel bedeuten, wenn du ihn zu Ende lesen würdest und mir Rückmeldung gibst. Es geht um Chatbots, Conversational Commerce, die Facebook Messenger Platform und ein Produkt, das ich entwickelt habe.

How to build a game like Flappy Bird with Xcode and SpriteKit

When I heard about Flappy Bird for the first time, the hype was already in its final phase: developer Dong Nguyen had decided to pull the app from the stores in “22 hours from now“. Apart from overreacting users and an allegedly daily advertising revenue of up to 50,000 US$, the simple game mechanics were something that caught my attention. The concept of clicking/tapping to keep the player on track wasn’t really an innovation in itself, but given the hype it caused, it was certainly worth a closer look. As a Sunday evening challenge, I tried to reproduce the game mechanics and ended up with less than 200 lines of code. Update Feb. 20th: I added the score counting part and included suggestions by readers Sascha and Nico. Updated code is pushed to GitHub. Update Feb. 27th: Fixed a small glitch in the tutorial that DylanYasen pointed out, thanks! (No code change.) Update Apr. 9th: Sorry, I currently don’t have time to update the tutorial. In the meantime, take a look what reader Daniel Bocksteger …

LeWeb 2010 startups revisited

Around the same time in 2011, I wrote a posting about the LeWeb 2010 finalists and startup success in general. I placed a reminder into my calendar to revisit the list in 2012 and went to check whether the companies were still alive and well. Unfortunately, I never released the post. Now, another year later, I saw the unreleased draft and decided to update it once again. Votizen – acquired by causes.com (open positions 11/2012: 2) Simple (former BankSimple) – online and hiring (2012: 7, 2013: 7) Blekko – online, no jobs offers found (open positions 11/2012: 3) Hipmunk – online and hiring (2012: 1, 2013: 5) Optimizely – online and hiring (2012: 9, 2013: 21) 1000 Memories – aquired by ancestry.com Elation EMR – online and hiring (2012: 3, 2013: 5) CueUp (former Greplin) – acquired by Apple, now defunct (2012: 4.5) SavingStar (SaveWave) – online and hiring (2012: 1, 2013: 3) Topguest – acquired by Switchfly Beautylish – online and hiring (2012: 1, 2013: 3) GroupMe – online and hiring (2012: 3, 2013: …