9 teams win The @ Company’s second @appathon
Phase 2 of our @appathon II came to a close earlier this April. Seventeen participating teams each developed a pitch and app demo, and our judges selected nine deserving winners.
Track 1 of our @appathon was designated for students and alumni from Zimbabwe, and was sponsored by the Computer Society of Zimbabwe. Track 2, our Global track, included students from the US, Canada, Bermuda, Bangladesh, as well as any country outside of Zimbabwe.
All of these apps are developed on the @platform, a technology that allows for total privacy and gives people…
Written by Barbara Tallent, CEO of The @ Company
“You can’t create a company culture when everyone is virtual.” Really?
I’m paraphrasing but this is from a book I recently read by Martin Lindstrom titled “The Ministry of Common Sense”. I quite enjoyed the book, but he said something like this multiple times throughout the book and it really set me off. I thought, what on earth is he talking about? Maybe he hasn’t read anything from Matt Mullenweg on the matter.
When we first started The @ Company in 2019, we decided we would be virtual. That way we…
Privacy in and of itself is not “fun.” It’s like a bran muffin: good for you, but not particularly exciting.
I once had a friendly debate with a colleague of mine at AWS about what mattered to customers. I headed up marketing for the Startups group and saw, for early-stage startups, our most interesting storyline being the many programs and services we offered that got early-stage prototypes set up quickly and cheaply, and that connected them to funding and growth. My colleague thought I should lead with product features.
He wasn’t wrong. Technical founders do want to know about distinct…
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter capitalize on our desire to be seen.
On my 15th birthday, my friends decided enough was enough and made me a Facebook account.
Unlike the rest of my high school peers, I was several years late to the social media game. My father had been protective of my technology use, limiting my computer hours and access to certain sites with the fearsome power of Parental Controls. So when all my classmates were staying up sending histrionic “Forward this to 5 people or you’ll DIE!!!!!!!” …
Written by Anthony Prakash
Flutter-Engage, which took place on March 3, brought together the global developer community unlike any other event I have seen in the past. It reminded me of the glory days of Apple when people awaited every new WWDC with bated breath and blocked their calendars so that they would be ready to line up at the Apple store, even without knowing what the latest iPhone had to offer. With all the buzz surrounding the Flutter event, I thought to myself “What is different about Flutter? What is the fuss all about?” …
Talk about agile development.
Coming up with a promising app idea, tackling a brand new stack/technology, and delivering a pitch within 48 hours is no small feat. That’s why we were so impressed with the entries we received for our API challenge at Stanford’s TreeHacks 2021. A weekend-long hackathon, TreeHacks took place on February 12–14 and was themed Hacking For the Future: addressing deeply impactful problems and building creative, unique solutions.
During the weekend, we posed our own challenge to students by asking them to develop a simple mobile application using Flutter and the @protocol. Built using Dart, the @protocol…
Written by Jory Des Jardins
A couple of years ago I had a neighbor who’d scored a big job at an ascendant tech company. This company had captured my admiration for its underdog mentality, constant innovation, and willingness to publicly declare when it got something wrong and then fix it. I recall commenting to my neighbor, for example, how impressed I was with the company’s policy toward enforcing gender pay equity after an internal team had discovered a compensation discrepancy between male and female executives.
I was saddened to hear when, four months into the role, my neighbor shared with…
Interview by Tyler McNierney
Introduction
At the surface level, the @protocol appears to be a simple, robust software development infrastructure that magically provides a backend service for apps that are built on top of it. Beyond the list of verbs (e.g. put, getKeys), its monitoring service, and libraries that provide @protocol functionalities, The @ Company’s Internet protocol at its highest abstraction layer doesn’t really reveal too much to the software developer (and rightly so to make their programming lives easier!). Diving deeper into the @protocol, you will soon realize that there is a lot at play, from various rounds of data…
By Muralidharan Padmanaban, Naresh Gurijala and Intiser Ahmed
What is synchronization?
In the @protocol world, your personal data is encrypted with your own private key and stored on your mobile device. Periodically, this data is copied securely over to a dedicated cloud server which only you can decrypt and read since you have sole access to your private key. Nobody else, including The @ Company can read your data. The process of maintaining identical copies of this data on the server and your mobile devices is known as synchronization.
Commit Log
Commit logs play a crucial role in the @protocol synchronization process. When you perform…
The @ Company
Now for some Internet Optimism
