Google’s 1st Hackathon in Southeast Asia: Who’s coming?

*For Singapore-based developers, we are sorry but registration is closed. For the 400 who have signed up, BIG THANKS for helping put Singapore-based developers on the map! Singapore has joined Thailand and Philippines in closing their registration with 2 weeks to spare b4 the event. =) If you wish to be on the waiting list, do leave a note on our Facebook event page here.

Google’s FIRST hackathon in Southeast Asia is coming to Singapore on 28 October!  To be held at the Singapore Management University (SMU) Campus, this event is similar to the OpenSocial South America Tour held earlier this year in April/May. In the 1st of our event updates, we introduce you to the Google staff that will be making the trip from their Mountain View campus.

Venue: Singapore Management University Administration Building
Date: 28 October 2008, Tuesday
Time: 1pm to 10pm

Registration is still open for developers from Malaysia. The sweetener for Malaysian developers is that your travel expenses will be subsidized by a special scheme by the Media Development Authority (MDA) Singapore. click on the red sign up button below to signup or learn more!

In a brief insight on the hackathon in South America, there were Tech Talks, Social Network presentations, as well as an OpenSocial hackathon, where developers were invited to develop application using the OpenSocial standard.  At the end of the day, they had presentations of the applications and organizer awards for the best ones!  More on the OpenSocial South American Tour here and here!

The Google DevFest in Singapore will be similar with Google giving introductions their APIs like the OpenSocial and App Engine APIs among others, and Social Network giants Friendster and Hi5 talking about their platforms too.  Join us for a day of geeky fun, with beer and ice cream available too!

What’s more, we will be having 5 Google Engineers coming all the way from Mountain View to join in the DevFest and to provide assistance to the developers.  Grab this chance to mingle with them!

Here are the short profiles of the Google Engineers coming down:

Jason Costa
Jason has been a Technical Programs Manager at Google since 2005. He’s worked on several products at the company, including Google Analytics, the Google Checkout API, and OpenSocial. Jason likes to help developers find innovative solutions to complex problems, and believes in APIs & the open web. He graduated with a degree in CS from USC, and is currently working from the Google China office in Beijing.

Patrick Chanezon (blog)
Patrick has been a Developer Advocate at Google since 2005. He has built and grown developer ecosystems for OpenSocial, Checkout and AdWords. Previously he has worked on portals, blogs and syndication feeds at Sun Microsystems, AOL and Netscape. He’s the co-founder of the ROME – Atom and RSS utilities in java open source project and the OSSGTP (Open Source Get Together Paris) group.

Pamela Fox
Pamela is the Developer Programs Engineer for the Google Maps API. She graduated from USC with her CS masters, where she helped grow the video games department and dabbled in the 3d animation and linguistics departments. She enjoys helping developers innovate with the Maps API and combine it with many of Google’s other amazing APIs.

Conway Chen
Conway has been at Google since 2005 and is a member of New Business Development.  Working together with product, engineering and management teams, he has helped introduce and foster a number of new product initiatives and is currently focused on doing the same within the Greater China and SE Asia region.  Prior to his time working in business development, Conway was an attorney focusing on venture capital and private company representation at a leading Silicon Valley law firm.

Bruno Rovagnati – Globant
Bruno is a social networks guru at Globant as well as an expert on cloud computing. He joins us all live all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina! Bruno has worked extensively with the Google Checkout API, and is an active contributor to Shindig – an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial spec. Bruno graduated from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires.