Oddvar Lovaas

We are very happy to again be one of the organisations selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC)!

Last year we had two students working on Matrix-projects over the summer - you can read the retrospective here - and now we are again offering students to work on Matrix as part of GSoC! Currently we are in the stage where students can propose interesting project ideas to any of the open source organisations picked by Google. Of course, we encourage students to get in touch with us and discuss their ideas before writing their application - please come say hi in the #gsoc:matrix.org room!

We are very eager to see what ideas students come up with. We have added our own ideas here, but students are expected to do some research and come up with their own ideas for projects. We have also written down some general tips on what to include in the application.

Applications can be submitted from March 20th, so there's still plenty of time to have a play with Matrix and come up with a cool project idea!

Good luck!

TADHack Global 2016 was held across 30+ different locations last weekend. The goal in the TADHack is to create a hack over the weekend, using one or more of the APIs provided by the sponsors - of which Matrix is one.

Over 2600 people participated, and over 150 hacks were created! I think it's safe to say that TADHack Global 2016 was a great success!

The Matrix team were on location in Shoreditch, London, where we helped people with their hacks (while also keeping an eye on the online TADHack Matrix room to help remote entries).

Several teams used Matrix in their hack, both in London and elsewhere:

In Lisbon, Luis Tonicha and Tiago Dias created "Athos": a bot for shopping assistance. The bot accepts various queries which it tries to answer using Carrefour's API. The team also created a Telestax bridge, so you can send the queries via SMS! This hack won the Lisbon location prize! Watch their presentation here.

A team in Moscow did a hack using Matrix, where they created a kind of MUD in Matrix. Unfortunately, the presentation is not currently available.

Yelly was a remote entry by Fikri Fırat, Utku Yavuz, and Barış Erbil. It is a voice message based chat application inspired by the nature of shouting as a way of communication. See their presentation here.

In Kiev, Ukraine, the DataArt team (Artem Malykhin, Pavlina Bevz, Igor Maximenko, and Eugene Grachev) created a hack called "Web conference for Smart TV": an app for Smart TVs for VoIP conferencing. See the presentation here.

Over in Chicago, Sergio Gil, Caterina Lazaro, and Anup Mohan created "Little Endian Kitchen": Shopping management for your kitchen. The idea was to have a webcam in your fridge that can check which items are "missing" (e.g. which ones need replacing) and even provide a VoIP stream so you can check yourself (even using VR-goggles!) - see the presentation here.

In Berlin, there were quite a few hacks. One of these was called "Clipboard Monkey" and was made by Tim Unkrig, Tammo Behrends, Markus Kerschkewicz. This team created a decentralized, universal and fully encrypted clipboard using Matrix. See the full presentation here. We awarded this hack one of the two global prizes of a MacBook Air! They were also joint winners of the Berlin location prize - well done!

Finally, in London we had several teams working on Matrix hacks. There was the "Moodlight" hack by Astrid de Gasté, Ryan Lintott, Tomas Zezula, Istvan Hoffer, and Jing Chan. The team created a sentiment analysis bot connecting Riot (now Element)/Matrix to Philips Hue, and analysing the comments in a room using a Social Sentiment Analysis library - blue light for positive comments and red for less positive chat. Watch the presentation here. This hack won the London Location Prize!

Also in London, there was Immanuel Baskaran's "Hangouts Bridge" hack, which bridged Matrix to Google Hangouts! Presentation here. In classic "dangerous demo" fashion, Google Hangouts experienced an outage just when the demo was happening. We awarded this hack the Special Matrix Prize - congrats Immanuel!

"Matrix of Things" by Matt Williams, and Yin Yee Kan won the other Matrix global prize, which was a MacBook Air. They created a minimal Matrix client on a ESPB266 micro controller, and added a proximity sensor feature to Riot (now Element) so that two different devices can notice when they are in close proximity. See the presentation and demo here!

Congrats to all the participants - we hope you had a lot of fun! The full list of winners is available over on the TADHack blog.

And if the hackathon has inspired you to hack on Matrix, please come chat to us in #matrix-dev or the TADHack Matrix room!

Vector Android has been added to the F-Droid catalogue. F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. Many people have asked or requested Vector to be added to F-Droid, so we are happy to be able to announce its inclusion.

In order to meet the requirements for F-Droid, the build is not using GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) for notifications - instead it will keep syncing in the background. If you find that the ongoing background sync is using too much battery, you can add a delay or change the timeout of the sync - or even disable background sync completely - in the settings page.

Finally, if you have feedback on any of the Vector clients, there is #vector-feedback:matrix.org.

The original promise of the Internet was to be an interoperable platform for distributing data. However, we have since increasingly seen our data fragmented and trapped in a number of proprietary silos. Matrix hopes to fix this by being a federated, open standard for data exchange that any service can use.

The Decentralized Web Summit is a meetup for anyone interested in building the Decentralized Web, which aims to make the Web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control. It takes place at the Internet Archive, San Francisco, CA on Wednesday June 8 and Thursday June 9, 2016.

Matrix will be represented at the event, and we hope to also host a workshop or a talk about Matrix.

The meetup has a Slack room set up for pre-meetup conversations - you can also access this room via Matrix: #decentralizedweb-general:matrix.org

We are looking forward to interesting people and interesting conversations at the first Decentralized Web Summit!

Last week I went to Kamailio World 2016 in Berlin to meet fellow VoIP-developers and tell them all about Matrix. It's a fairly small conference, which is actually quite nice as it means you get to talk to almost everyone. A lot of people were interested in Matrix - both new and familiar faces - in fact, some of them heard about Matrix a year ago at Kamailio World 2015 and were interested in hearing what progress we've made since.

As always, Matrix participated in James Body's dangerous demos session - and I also gave a 30min talk on Matrix and recent updates to a full room on the first day of the conference.

Several people mentioned that Matrix could be interesting to their project, either as a glue between services, or for adding text-based chat to VoIP apps. I hope to see some of you in Matrix at some point - please join us in #matrix:matrix.org and say hi! It's also a good place to ask questions and discuss how Matrix can work with your project. Auf Wiedersehen!

Congratulations to Aviral Dasgupta and Will "Half-Shot" Hunt who will be working with Matrix for their Google Summer of Code projects!

As mentioned, picking two projects out of all our proposals was no easy task. However, we now look forward to getting started, and we are sure Aviral and Half-Shot will help make Matrix even better over the next few months!

Aviral will be developing a flexible plugin system to facilitate integrating various services such as github/trello/duckduckgo with Matrix. Meanwhile, Half-Shot will be looking at adding features on top of Matrix - infact, he's already built a MPD DJ bot and started working on a .NET SDK. Aviral too, has been committing various enhancements already.

According to Google's GSoC timeline we are currently in the "Community Bonding" phase, which lasts till May 22, 2016 - which is when the projects formally kick off.

We're looking forward to seeing what awesome things Aviral and Half-Shot come up with!

As previously announced, Matrix is participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. We have had a lot of interest: lots of people joining Matrix to talk to us about their project ideas and a total of 38 project proposals. We have even had some code contributions to our various projects from people who discovered Matrix via GSoC!

It's our first year as a GSoC mentoring organisation and we were only allocated two project slots. This means that we had the tough decision of choosing between some really good projects - and that means a lot of you who applied will unfortunately be left feeling disappointed. Selecting our two projects was very difficult, and we talked it over until we all agreed. Please remember that not being picked does not mean that your proposal was bad.

If you missed out on a GSoC slot this year, that doesn't have to stop you from contributing, either by hacking on your own project or contributing to an existing Matrix project. It's a great way to hone your programming skills and we'll be more than happy to help out and support you - find us in #matrix:matrix.org and #matrix-dev:matrix.org.

All the best from the Matrix team and good luck to everyone in their summer projects, whether GSoC or not!

TADHack-mini took place in east London over the weekend with 88 people in attendance. There were $8k in prizes, and five different services to hack on. This time, we didn't have too many people using Matrix in their hack, but we did have an excellent idea and implementation called Babelonio, who won our prize: a Phantom X Hexapod Mk3!

Babelonio adds speech-to-text and translation via Google translate to Matrix, via the Vector client and a Chrome extension. This is quite nice, because it means you don't have to run a custom client. And by using Google translate, you immediately get access to a lot of languages (although sometimes the translation doesn't quite work, as you can see in the presentation video). The project was done by Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen. You can see the presentation and demo of the hack here.

A good write-up of all the hacks and winners can be found on the TADHack blog.

Thanks to the TADHack organisers for another fine event, and also to everyone who came over to chat about Matrix - and again congratulations to the Babelonio team:

It's soon time for the 2nd TADHack-mini London. The event starts at 10am on Saturday April 9th and hacking continues until the projects are pitched, starting at 1pm on Sunday April 10th. As you can see by the many previous TADHacks, every hackathon brings interesting and impressive projects, so we are again expecting great things!

As usual, there are great prizes to be won - worth around $5k in total. This time, we will award the best Matrix-related hack a PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III from Trossen Robotics, a build-it-yourself hexapod robot kit! The robot is built on an entirely open source platform, complete with 3D cad models of the robot, open software, and schematics for the electronics.

If you're planning to attend TADHack-mini London: see you there! If not - why aren't you? Consider spending a day and a half hacking on some cool technologies - it could be well worth your time!

You can be one step ahead by getting acquainted with the Matrix C-S API or the AS API. And if you have any questions - or want to discuss potential hacks - please come talk to us in #matrix:matrix.org!

We are very happy to be one of the companies selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016!

GSoC is a great, global opportunity for students to work on open source projects during their university summer break. The idea is for students to propose a project for any of the open source organisations picked by Google, and - if accepted - receive a stipend for working on it. We are very eager to see what projects students will propose - we have written up some ideas here, but students are expected to do some research and come up with projects themselves.

If you are a student wanting to participate in GSoC for Matrix, please come talk to us in #gsoc:matrix.org - we are happy to discuss project ideas and review application drafts. We have also added some general tips on what to include in the application here.

Applications can be submitted starting next Monday, so there's still plenty of time to have a play with Matrix and come up with a cool project idea.

Good luck!