Introducing Shindig-dnd

Posted by Alex Haro on Monday, February 09, 2009

As part of our core strategy at Life360, we are building a developer API that will allow third-party developers to create their own widgets (web-based components based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on our platform. Included in this strategy is a web console which allows users to view and arrange the various widgets they want to use. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we went out in search of a project that could help us fulfill our goal. Enter the Shindig project, an open source Apache incubator project that allows us to serve our widgets.

Unfortunately, the Shindig project does not come with the ability to drag-and-drop the widgets. To add this functionality, one of our core developers, Matt Russell, created an extension to Shindig called Shindig-dnd. Shindig-dnd adds several capabilities on top of Shindig to provide drag-and-drop functionality similar to something like iGoogle. Since we are such huge proponents of open source software, we have decided to release this code to the world and hope that other people can find cool and interesting things to do with it.

Screencasts

Demo showing off the main capabilities of Shindig-dnd:



Quick tutorial to get Shindig-dnd installed and running:



More Info


We hope you enjoyed the screencasts. If you would like to download the code you can get it at Google Code. The code has been tested on FF3, Safari3, and IE7, but please let us know if you have any issues with it. For a more technical discussion behind this project, please check out Matt Russell’s blog. And, if you have any other questions or would like to find out more about our developer API, feel free to email me at alex AT life360 DOT com. We hope you appreciate this code; we would appreciate it if you could rate some of our widgets and come up with you own ideas of apps to build on our platform over at Life360.

Thanks!

Welcome to the Life360 Prelaunch Site and Blog

Posted by Dilpreet Singh on Friday, October 31, 2008

Thanks for checking out our prelaunch site! Life360’s mission is simple: help families take care of life’s what-ifs, both large and small. Here is a brief introduction to our company:

What are we working on?

We are building a service that allows our customers to use the web to manage everything related to their family’s safety, security, and communications in one place. Sign up, fill out a quick profile, and then pick and choose from avariety of tools that can do everything from keeping your family connected after a major disaster to letting you know if your teenager misses curfew to getting instant help in an emergency situation to making sure that your toddler is always a button click away.

Interesting! Can you be a bit more specific?

We know that every family has its own unique concerns, so it is impossible to create a one-size-fits-all service that isn’t overwhelmingly complex. We solve this problem by providing our users with a single web portal that then allows them to choose from a set of tools, each of which addresses a specific need.

Basically, we can ask you “what are the top 5 things you worry about” and we will probably have an application that takes care of each one.

Let’s take the example of the Smith family which consists of two parents, a teenager, a preschooler, a toddler, and a dog. The top five things the Smiths might worry about are the following:

1. Their toddler getting lost at the mall or park

2. The teenager going out and getting in trouble at night

3. Major natural disasters (the Smiths live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a high risk zone for earthquakes and wildfires)

4. Someone being in an accident and not getting the right care—or the family not finding out what happened

5. The dog running away

Each of these concerns can be directly addressed using a Life360 tool. For the
Smith family, we would provide the following solutions:

  • Curfew Monitor to take the worry out of waiting for 16-year-old Jill to come home at night
  • TrackMe to make sure 2-year-old Tammy is on her mom’s radar at all times
  • LiveID to make sure that emergency responders or good Samaritans can help you in case of a medical emergency
  • Emergency Messenger to keep the family connected even if most infrastructure fails
  • Pet Tracker so that the family quadruped is accounted for

Because all tools are part of the Life360 service, you can manage them all from one place. It’s cheaper, easier, and exponentially faster than signing up for 5 different services from 5 different companies. We’ll be posting specific information on each of our tools shortly.

How do we do it?
For all you techies out there, our core technology is an integrated multi-channel messaging, tracking, and mobile communications system. We essentially combine messaging (voice, SMS, data, IM, email), GPS tracking, emergency management, and smartphone technology into a platform that can be accessed and managed through a simple set of APIs.

I have an idea for a cool tool!

Please challenge our creativity and tell us what we’ve missed! Recommend an idea for a tool to us, and if we end up selecting and building it, we will send you a free Emergency Preparedness Kit (we normally sell them for $124.95) and a free Life360 account for life.

Developer API

We are working on a third-party developer API that will allow people in the community to build their own widgets on our platform and offer it to other Life360 users. For more information on the developer platform, send an email to alex at life360.com . The developer platform is still in its early stages so we would value any input you can provide.

Winning the Android Developer Challenge and the 24 Hour Homepage Turnaround

Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, August 28, 2008

Welcome to the first blog post from Life360; it was our intent to use this space to talk about the company, but instead let me tell you about our last 24 hours. We were a Top 50 winner in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, and were expecting the final round results sometime next week, when last night, we got a call giving us the excellent news that we were picked as one of the first place teams!

You can’t imagine how excited we were—but then the reality quickly turned to panic when we realized that meant we needed to build a homepage within 24 hours. After a quick celebratory drink at Bear’s Lair in Berkeley, we started bracing for a hectic day, and here is the result! If you look around you’ll see a few holes here and there (please excuse us), but to the dev and design team, thanks for coming through in a pinch, and for everyone else, please check back frequently over the next few days as we add content.

If you are reading this, you are probably interested in our Android application. We’ll try to post some more comprehensive screenshots later tonight or tomorrow and perhaps a video next week. I’m also very excited to do our “real” company introduction, because Android and mobile is only one piece of what we are about—so stay tuned!

We also are very curious to hear what you think. If you post a comment or shoot us an email I promise to get back to you.