Top 5 AOL Video Contest Winners Announced

Kevin Farnham, August 15th, 2008

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AOL and TopCoder have announced the winners of the Truveo Developer Challenge. As we reported in May, the AOL video contestants applied AOL’s Truveo Video Search API to develop “a cool widget, gadget, mashup or web application.” The $100,000 contest awarded $10,000 first place prizes to nine competitors; second place awards of $500 were awarded to 20 contestants. In total, there were 93 contest entries, all of which can be accessed through the contest web site.

Unleashing their creativity, developers introduced new applications ranging from a 3D elliptical orbit display for finding and sharing online videos, to a free new tool for creating animated .GIF images from online videos… The judging criteria included five equally weighted categories: Download and usage statistics; innovation; best use of the Truveo API and functionality; Truveo favorites; and popularity in peer review judging by the global TopCoder community.

The highest scoring entries include:

• MapOfVideo: find videos and Wikipedia articles related to a specific location identified using Google Maps (our Map of Video profile).
• SVid – Search, See, Share Videos: watch videos in 3D elliptical orbits; view related videos in a fractal; tag videos; drag and drop videos into your own albums (our SVid mashup profile).
• 3Styler for Facebook: search for videos; send invitations to watch videos to friends; create your own video searching profile; manage playlists (our 3styler for Facebook profile).
• TechVideoBytes: educational video search application, focused on technology videos for a wide selection of software engineering platforms (our Tech Video Bytes profile).
• Animated GIF Creator: capture frames from videos found using Truveo and convert them into animated GIF files; add effects such as greyscale and flipping, add text, and translate text (our Animated GIF Creator profile).

You can read more about AOL’s Truveo Video Search API in our Truveo profile and at the Truveo Video Search API home page. A search on the AOL Developer Network for “Truveo” will return many articles and blog posts that talk about the API and provide case studies that demonstrate how to develop rich video search applications using Truveo.

For more video mashups built with the AOL Truveo API, see the 22 AOL video mashups in our directory.