A Peek Into Palooza
2014/06/18

Every two months, BitTorrent holds an internal hackathon we call a Palooza. Projects are presented. People vote. Great ideas are born. We present this month’s report.

Pro users of our BitTorrent mobile app may have seen an update last week on a new power saving feature. It tracks the level of your battery, and if it’s running low, your torrents will pause to help conserve energy. You enjoy the same fast download/upload speeds, without having to worry about battery drain.

This feature was presented during our February 2014 Palooza and won the audience vote. Whether it’s entire products like BitTorrent Sync and BitTorrent Bundle, or key features like this that help our users do more, Palooza allows the BitTorrent team to experiment. It sits at the heart of our bottom-up innovation approach, and with dedicated time allocated, teams can work on their projects in peace.

For June 2014, mobile was another big theme, and we saw over half of the projects centered around a mobile application. Web developers also got a bit of love, as well as the data-loving community.

BitTorrent Palooza

In recap of the projects we saw:

  • A tool to do MaxDiff surveys with analysis, which gives essentially the same results as conjoint analysis (used to quantify how respondents value a given set of attributes) but allows the survey forms to be updated and the results to be displayable in real time

  • A quick file download feature on Android that uses an Android window overlay, so users don’t disrupt the flow when executing an action handled by another “intent”

  • An improvement on the Bencode parser that enables safer and faster Bencode parsing

  • A mobile app that leverages Twitter to solve the dilemma of having something trivial (but amazingly important) to share, but not wanting to email the entire company #MicroParty

  • A new mechanism to prevent users from having to use more than 1 app to find and view content online; It integrates both live stream and a solid UI

Another successful Palooza!

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