The first tenet of our mission is “Make bitcoin easy to use.” Etch delivers a secure and simple way for Coinbase users to send bitcoin with a smart watch. Etch is built with the Coinbase API, which allows developers to quickly build bitcoin into their third party applications.
The story of Etch:
Ahryun Moon, Jasper Sone, and Peter Lee are the small and nimble Etch team, who conceived, planned, and built their app in 48 hours during the the San Francisco Launch Hackathon. During the hackathon, the Etch team competed with nearly 800 other developers who worked on a wide variety of projects. Coinbase engineers were excited to see so many interesting new applications built with bitcoin. Etch’s unique messaging tool edged out nearly two dozen other Coinbase developers to win the first place prize.
Etch not only won the Coinbase API prize, but made it all the way to the top 5 teams of the entire hackathon. Those top 5 teams were invited to present on the Launch Festival main stage alongside 50 startup finalists who had been selected from thousands of festival applications. Here's their presentation:
Q: What is Etch, and where do you plan to take it in the future?
A: Etch allows a user to draw a simple shape on her smart watch to send a text message or trigger actions such as calling an Uber, finding nearby restaurants, or sending money or bitcoin. Especially on smaller and smaller screens, we believe apps must eventually fade into the background, allowing users to focus on the functionality through easy and seamless human interfaces. Etch provides a minimal user interface, allowing users to quickly accomplish tasks without having to navigate between multiple apps.
Q: How was your experience building with the Coinbase API? What was hard? What was surprising?
A: Our Coinbase implementation enables an exchange of bitcoin between two strangers on their smart watches without sharing any personal information. We used the Android SDK on the client side to authenticate the user with Coinbase. We were pleasantly surprised at how easy the entire process was. However, we found parameter encoding to be a bit confusing with the REST API as there was no plain vanilla Javascript SDK that we could use with our backend. We’re happy to hear that you’re working on that.
Q: Any advice for other developers?
A: Prior to digging into the API documentation and coding, have a clear idea of what product you want to build. Since the documentation is very clear and well segmented, this will save you time as you will only need to read as much as you need to complete your project.
Q: What opportunity does bitcoin represent to you and your future users?
A: Coinbase in combination with Etch will make it possible for bitcoin to be exchanged like cash without sharing any sensitive information, and while maintaining maximum security. Coinbase has given us the opportunity to provide Etch users an alternative way to conveniently pay for goods and services in the physical world. We look forward to launching Etch soon. Thank you Coinbase for making bitcoin payment integration simple.
You can sign up for the Etch private beta here and follow them at @etchforme for more information on what they're building.
via The Coinbase Blog http://ift.tt/1xlrUoC
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