Rhapsody and ClearForest Winners

John Musser, December 19th, 2006

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As noted earlier this month a number of this fall’s mashup contests have reached their deadlines for entry submission. For two of them, the Rhapsody Web Services Contest and ProgrammableWeb sponsor ClearForest’s Semantic Web Services (SWS) Mashup competition 2006, the mashup entries have now been reviewed and the winners announced. Here’s Rhapsody’s announcement and here’s ClearForest’s press release. Both contests did an excellent job of getting developers to try the APIs, generated a variety of innovative ideas, and lead to some very interesting mashups.

For Rhapsody, where I was one of the judges, there was diversity in how and where the mashups run. Take for example, the winning entry, Rhapsody Remote (which btw, won developer Aaron Murrell a trip for two anywhere in the world to see his favorite band). Aaron created a PC client and Pocket PC interface that turn the Pocket PC device into a remote control for Rhapsody. Here’s his explanation and you can see his mashup below:

Like many other subscribers, I love to listen to Rhapsody streams via an old computer connected to my home stereo. What I’ve been wanting for a long time is a way to avoid the hassle of getting up and messing with that computer to queue up a new set of songs, browse, and search through the Rhapsody catalog. Various hardware solutions and have approached this problem in many ways but often left core features lacking like searching music data outside of the music saved in your library, or playlists. Rhapsody Remote uses Rhapsody Web Services to allow you to search through the Rhapsody catalog, queue up songs and control the Rhapsody client software all from a WiFi connected handheld.

Other winners include:

• Pamela Fox and Ben Lisbakken’s Music Mash, a Google Gadget that let’s you search Rhapsody’s catalog of millions of songs by their lyrics. You can also use it to find YouTube and Yahoo videos.



• Derek Atlansky’s Rhapsody Scrobbler that monitors Rhapsody for tracks played and automatically submits them to the user’s Last.fm profile.
• Nir Tzemah’s Rhapsody Top Feeds gadget that polls top songs and album feeds from Rhapsody RSS to let users stay on top of news about their favorite artists.

There are now 11 Rhapsody mashups listed here with more coming soon.

For the ClearForest contest we’re adding more entries today and tomorrow’s blog post will give you the details on the winners from that one.