This weekend I attended my first ever hacking event: Music Hackday Boston 2011. It was an incredibly exciting, intense experience with plenty of creative inspirational energy. We had ambitious goals which were largely attained, but when it came to the demo, we failed hard. At least, it felt like we did. As I reflected on the demo while we drove home in the black winter night, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” came to mind. This is the story my personal ring of fire at Music Hackday and how I fell into it.
APIs are connecting small businesses and helping create new partnerships. One organization making that happen is the Small Business Web, a consortium of API providers that are working together to create better small business tools. The group is holding its first-ever summit November 11-12 in San Jose and you’re invited.
The Tnooz THack event at ITA Google’s headquarters in Boston was a lesson in how overwhelming development for the travel industry can be. On the morning of the first day of the hackathon, the eleven API hosts provided brief descriptions of their APIs and their respective functionality or access to data. It became clear, very quickly, that most of the APIs were not like the Twitter API or Google Maps API. Many of the APIs delivered a lot of complex data in a highly structured format. Building some kind of mash-up using any of the APIs would be a challenge.
Yahoo has had a rich tradition of organizing hack events globally, where developers come together for a day or two and hack on Yahoo APIs. Now imagine a battle of champions, where all previous winners of Yahoo’s worldwide Open Hack and University Hack Day events are pitted against each other in an event with the grand prize winner earning a year of incubation with Yahoo. Well, Yahoo just did that.
This week at the Twilio Conference, the five finalists of the latest round of the Twilio Fund will be pitching their startups to compete for investment from the micro-fund. The fund is meant to encourage usage of the Twilio API as a platform and was created through a Twilio and 500 Startups partnership.
X.commerce is the new brand for the developer commerce tools that include the eBay API and PayPal API. The first conference under this new brand is coming in October to San Francisco. As a media partner, we have a promo code, as well as a little more information about how the company is looking to create a sum greater than its parts with the X.commerce platform.
Twilio is inviting developers out to the Bay Area for two days of networking, panels and hacking when it hosts the upcoming Twilio Conference. With a focus on cloud communications over 40 speakers will talk about building great apps, highlight their successes and share advice on how to make money with your product.
Is this the year of the API? Or is it next year? As we’ve pointed out before, the API universe is expanding. You have a chance now to make sure when thousands of geeks descend upon Austin next March, that this new way of the web is given the billing it deserves. But you have to get moving by September 2.
Hackathons are now a part of mainstream. Our coverage of the changing nature of Hackathons shows that they are being applied to different streams too. The latest hackathon is API-oriented and presents another opportunity for devs to learn about APIs, interact with other devs, build something cool and win prizes.
16 developers and designers showed off their projects and many more participated at this weekend’s API Hack Day PDX. The overall winner was an app that helps friends communicate about a planned event using an email and SMS hybrid. Others took on Portland government data and worked with multiple APIs to get details around a specific location. We list many of them in our Hackday Gallery.
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