John Musser, February 22nd, 2006 Comments(3)

Podbop! This is the winning new mashup as voted by attendees at this week’s MashupCamp. Podbop’s creator Taylor McKnight was awarded a powerful Sun Niagra/TI Ultrasparc system by Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz.

Part of what makes this mashup a winner is that it’s genuinely useful: enter your city or other location and Podbop will go to the Eventful database to find what bands are coming to town starting today and the simultaneously get a set a mp3 (legal) downloads for those acts so you can check-out the acts in advance. It will also automatically create a podcast feed of this data for you so you can download it to your iPod or other media player. Nice UI as well.

And the voting wasn’t easy, there were about 20 entries and runners-up included ChicagoCrime.org (which gets more impressive every time I see it) and the inspired new application FlySpy (not live yet) which lets you visualize upcoming airfare prices over time so you can see when to get the best deal.

Overall the conference was a big success and had a high-quality signal-to-noise ratio. Which speaks well of the efforts by organizers David Berlind, Doug Gold along with advisers Mary Hodder and Doc Searls. It was about seven or eight weeks from the time they said hey, let’s do this conference to this week’s delivery of successful event! Could be a viable new “lightweight” model for conferences.

If you’re interested in attending MashupCamp 2, with a time and date TBD but not too far off, you can sign-up here (there’s already 235 people on the list).