October 2015 — Astea sponsored this year’s edition of HackTUES. The hackathon for high-school students took place on October 9–11 and focused on environment and society. The topic was received with enormous enthusiasm by the contestants, all aged between 14 and 18. Their creative ideas and impressive coding skills produced an amazing collection of working applications, including: a game where you grow your virtual pet tree, a marketplace for recycling, and even a medical e-dossier. Read more…

October 2015 — Learning Ally recently released Link for Chromebooks, a Chrome-based version of the organisation’s Link e-book reader for students with dyslexia, learning disabilities, or visual impairment. Astea helped in the development of the playback solution that has significantly expanded the number of students able to succeed with audiobooks. Link for Chromebooks currently has over 60 000 active users.

September 2015 — Polly Analytics is a free analytical tool that allows users to combine a state-of-the-art institutional investment process with their own investing insights.

Following the recent completion of a major development milestone, Polly Analytics is now open to anyone to sign up and use the smart portfolio recommendation platform. Read more…

May 2015 — SocialBook, a social reading platform developed at Astea and co-owned by Astea and publishing industry visionary, Bob Stein, was nominated as one of 20 semi-finalists in BookExpo America’s Start Up Challenge. While we unfortunately did not win the challenge, SocialBook did win the BookExpo Challenge’s People’s Choice Award for best start up!

January 2015 — CapThat released the latest version of its application at the end of last year. The tool that allows you to create stunning collages from videos and pictures now enables Coldplay fans to come up with great shirts, wall-art items and accessories made with their band’s favorite logos and insignia.

Check it out at capcoldplay.com.

November 2014 — Once again Astea was a sponsor of the fourth semi-annual hackathon HackFMI, held traditionally in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University! This edition was more massive than ever — over 250 competitors in 55 teams hacked code day and night for a whole weekend and took their best shot in bringing their project ideas to life.

Speaking of projects, the reason HackFMI 4.0 was so exciting for everybody involved was its one and only rule — create a whole game from scratch! Read more…

November 2014 — At the end of the third year of the Cloud4all project, Astea completed one of its major activities within the project — the Smart House Online Simulation. The quick video below is a virtual tour of a smart house, which showcases how the interfaces of various appliances adapt to users’ needs and preferences according to their profiles. Read more…

October 2014 — Barnes & Noble recently announced its new initiative — the Annual Reader’s Choice Newsstand Awards! For the first time readers can vote for their favorite articles in several categories. Being engineers and all, our vote goes to Popular Mechanics’ privacy tips.

Clicking the cover on the right will take you to the Promotional Article Viewer: an HTML5 reader developed from scratch by Astea on behalf of Barnes & Noble Newsstand. In addition to offering the usual features, such as quick and easy navigation and social network sharing, one of the most notable perks of the reader is that it will run in almost any browser on almost any screen! Pick your favorite — Firefox on your laptop, Safari on your iPad, or Chrome on your Android phone — all of them offer an optimized reading experience. Check out all the articles for free at nook.com/readershoice!

September 2014 — CourseKicker was announced a winner of the NYC’s BigApps challenge! Among the 20 finalists in the Learn category CourseKicker was honoured with the grand prize as the best tool that allows teachers to connect, collaborate and share best practices with colleagues beyond their own schools, anywhere in the world.

CourseKicker uses social networking and crowdsourcing techniques to help teachers build strong professional networks, discover best practices, and recommend new connections and great lessons. Read more…

July 2014 — The HCI International 2014 conference took part in Crete, Greece on June 22-27. Astea Solutions demonstrated its work on the Smart House online simulation, part of the Cloud4all project. Read more…

May 2014 — Astea will present its latest work on the Cloud4All project in the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2014) which will take place from 22 to 27 June 2014 in Crete, Greece. Cloud4all is featured in six special sessions during the conference to demonstrate the recent advances of the project. Read more…

May 2014 — CourseKicker is a lesson discovery and sharing site for teachers. It allows teachers to:

• Easily and quickly find the best possible lesson plan for any subject
• Find videos and other materials to enhance a lesson
• Connect with other innovative teachers teaching the same subjects
• Share lessons and ideas for enhancing the classroom experience
• Follow how other teachers are teaching the same subject

CourseKicker’s simple yet modern interface allows for quick lesson planning and organization, easy interaction with other users, and rapid sharing. Lessons can be uploaded directly from the user’s computer or pasted in as links. Once uploaded, lessons are available live on the CourseKicker website where they can be reviewed, rated, and commented on by the members of the community. Read more…