Welcome Screen and the Millenium Falcon (Sony)

@johnwfitch directing

Can’t EatSocial without some delicious BBQ

If you know me at all, you know that food is near and dear to my heart.  After a few too many “what’s for dinner?” discussions I decided that eating, cooking and having a meal should not be so painful and hard. EatSocial is a food app designed for tablets that tells you what you can cook with what you have in your pantry.

Pitch Deck

Final Pitch Sunday Night

Demo
EatSocial.me

I hope you all check it out, please feel free to contact me with feedback or any questions. I plan to continue to develop the project on my own time so I am very interested in hearing what you think.

-Nate

Great job by Nick Spiller of uThinkTank and all of the UT student entrepreneurs.  I’m very jealous of all the opportunity and resources coming together to make UT and Austin the place for entrepreneurs – keep your eyes on them, big things are happening.  With Bob Metcalfe and crew pushing student entrepreneurs towards a tipping point, the University will be able to encourage the growth of innovative technology startups and incubate student entrepreneurs on an unprecedented scale.

Stanford total enrollment: 20k

The University of Texas at Austin: 50k

Plus, you’re in Austin and not Palo Alto.

The paramount goal of Longhorn Startup Camp is to establish a space in which students with startups can congregate, creating a critical mass of startup activity, a breeding ground for ideas, learning, exchanges of best practices, team formation and general celebration of startup progress.

- Bob Metcalfe

There are a lot of components to a successful startup ecosystem and one of the biggest is education.  The University of Texas at Austin worked with ATI to put Longhorn Startup Camp into place, a student incubator located in the new College of Information building in downtown Austin.  There are a ton of great startups that now have access to mentors, resources and most importantly a community that cares about their success. Please go out and support them by attending UTEweek, going on the week before SXSW.  Every entrepreneur and mentor that participates is helping to grow the startup community’s lifeblood, the willing and able student entrepreneurs in Austin!

Longhorn Startup Camp Showcases 27 New Companies During Startup Crawl March 8

And for those 1500+ 2,000+ people who have already RSVP’d for the event, we’d better see all of you at the GoLab…just not at once, please! This event has come together purely on community support, involvement and hustle by the GoLab members, be sure to RSVP and spread the word. We want GoLab Austin to be the ‘unofficial’ center of innovation and creation during the week so make sure to bring your ideas, expertise and passion along with you when the event rolls around.

We are still looking for a coffee sponsor so if you think you can help, please let me know.

Register for South by GoLab

Speakers

GoLab Austin / FG2

Steve Golab

Bootstrap Austin
Allen Beuershausen
Bijoy Goswami

ATX Startup Week
Jacqueline Hughes

Descuento Libre
Boris Portman

Hoover Academy
Gary Hoover

44 Doors
Tim Hayden

Appconomy
Aaron Papermaster

Gluu
Mike Schwartz

Forecast
Rene Pinnell
Eric Katerman

The Conference Catalyst
Thom Singer

Unstuck Books
Matt Williamson
Ben Roberts

East Austin Studio Tour
Shea Little

Catherine Nicole Jewelry
Catherine Cottingham

Betaworks
Jonathan Basker
Jason Morrow

Simversity
Moneet Singh

in.gredients
Brian Nunnery

Feedmagnet
Frank Burns

Avantica Technologies
John Hitchcock
Estuardo Robles

Courtship

When you open each application, the differences are stark:

Google’s Gmail application gives you strong contrast with the dark menu and tight, sharp text. The native mail app has the standard iOS native design, light blue on blue on more blueish blue.  Native iOS apps tend to use screen real estate very inefficiently, within Mail this is especially evident at the bottom portion of the application.  I feel like we’ll look back at this iOS design style like you look at Comic Sans as a font – sure, you could use it but its just a bit silly and clunky – the Gmail app is sexy in comparison.  As the mobile application user base increases through smartphone adoption and tablet transition, users will become more sophisticated, demanding better, faster and tighter design.

Stealing my heart

Then you have the message creation, where Gmail wins out again in contact search, although mostly by default.  The native mail app contact search is AWFUL, it drives me crazy.  When you are setting up your native Mail app, you have five choices, the second of which is Gmail. Assuming this means that Gmail users are in at least the top 5 of all users one could reasonably assume this is an important user base.  Following this argument, if one of the largest portions of the native Mail application user base has a Gmail account as their primary email, you could spend a little time working on their integration.

I realize there are a ton of corporate politics involved, including the competing iCloud and @me email addresses.  As usual Apple has gone the path of “we know better”…and they probably do.  However for now, the contacts I’m looking for are in Gmail, so it would be awesome if I could search them as well, especially when I’m trying to send an email.

As you can see (even when blurred) – the results are completely different.  One is what I’d expect to get, and it still isn’t great, when I search Gmail on the browser.  And the native mail app? Well, using some better logic as to whom I might want to email would be nice.

This next one frustrates me about the native app as well.  If you look below in the inbox screenshots, in Gmail there is a thread with 10 emails.  If you look at the native app, you can see 3 of those 10 emails, and about 1 1/2 other unrelated emails. Comparing these two screenshots; Gmail Inbox: 15 emails, Mail: 4.5. That’s a huge difference! Its just ridiculous.  Not only that, Gmail also trumps on archiving ability.  Apple needs to integrate some sort of “move out of the inbox but don’t delete” type of feature for me to switch to @me or develop a better answer. Incorporating the ability to search of old emails is invaluable. I’m a big fan of Lion’s Spotlight capabilities, I know Apple can execute a strong search function.

When it comes to structure, Gmail wins again, but not as handily.  The folder structure is dead, at least to me.  Why worry about what folder I put something in when I can just get it out of the way. As long as I remember one thing about the email (sender, partial subject, date range), I can find it when I need it again. This is an underlying advantage that Gmail has – folders are not necessary if your search function and built in recency functions are strong enough.

Well look at that, settings within the actual application that are relevant to email. Signature and out of office support, yes please.

 Love’s demise.

There is just one little problem.  Google’s application has an Achilles heel – it is slow. Like god-awful, manual refresh slow.  It is so bad that I couldn’t take it anymore and ended our turbulent affair, going back to Mail after forcing the Gmail app on myself since it was released.  I sent myself a few emails while writing this post from my computer on Gmail – as you can see, the native Mail app got them first.

This doesn’t really bother me because of speed but rather a feeling of reliability. When I send an email using the native mail app, I feel like the email was signed, sealed and delivered. With the Gmail app, I’m just not sure.  The transaction is sticky and slow – when I hit send there is a pause; did it send!? I’m not always sure, and that doesn’t make me happy.

Unfortunately for us iOS-Gmail-loving users out there, I really don’t think either party involved is in a huge rush to resolve their issues.  In addition to my concerns about Google and their ability to execute a strong iOS app, both through ineptitude and Apple’s corporate strategy, Google also has a whole other host of problems.  Google is going at social – and everything else be damned.  This is a big corporate shift for them and probably the right move.  By pushing Google+, making a unified product (Google takes flak for privacy policy consolidation), Google could potentially tread the line between Apple and Facebook with constant innovation and strong(er) corporate leadership. As for us iOS users, the corporate rivalry involved is just getting in the way of keeping a large and influential user base from complete fulfillment and until there is a solution I will be, sadly, incomplete.