March 18th, 2008

45 Mashup Contests and Counting

If you know how to develop mashups then you may be in line to win some very big prizes. To get a sense of just how much money and how many prizes, take a look at the ProgrammableWeb Contest Guide and you’ll find that there have been more than 45 mashup contests thus far. Prizes include Xbox 360 systems, $10,000 Alien ware computer systems, $50,000 in cash, and more. The contest prizes are getting bigger and more spectacular all the time. For example, in September 2007, Adobe awarded a $100,000 “trip of a lifetime” to the winner of the AIR Developer Derby. In December, startup Ooyala won the $100,000 first prize in Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge (see our earlier post about the contest).

In March the contest with the biggest prize to date gets underway. The winner of Salesforce.com’s Force.com Million Dollar Challenge will receive a $1,000,000 investment in their start-up company and a cubicle at the Salesforce.com incubator for one year. The most recent contest announcement was just last week when Zynga announced a competition for game developers using their platform.

Winning Mashups

So, what types of mashup have people developed to win these contests? With more than 45 contests already having completed, the winning entries have spanned a broad spectrum, as you’d expect. Quite a few prize-winning mashups provide services that are of everyday value to people. For example, the Home Locator mashup, winner of the Adobe Flex Developer Derby, lets you search real estate listings with photos and maps (mashup profile).

Need a doctor after hours? As we reported last year, the After Hours Doctor’s Office mashup, winner of the 2007 Etel Mashup Contest, transcribes office voice mails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. It’s great demonstration on how to get in contact with your doctor when you know she or he is not in the office.

The PamFax mashup , which won the 2007 Skype Mashup Competition, lets you send a fax to any fax machine in the world, paying with your Skype Credit (our profile).

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering about campaign finance and influence in your state, take a look at the winner of the Sunlight Foundation’s Mashup Congress Contest. The Unfluence mashup will show you your state’s political contribution data (our profile).

So, what stories are others identifying as being very interesting and relevant? What better source for this information is there than Digg? To our benefit, Digg offers the Digg API to developers, and many people have taken advantage of this to develop some very useful mashups. The Digg Expose mashup takes Snap.com images from Digg and displays them in a configurable view. You can drag the images around, sort them, or change the category. The Digg Charts mashup (profile), another Digg API Contest finalist entry, is a Flex application that generates charts comparing popular stories. Additionally, a graph is generated showing a selected story’s popularity over time. See all finalists in the Digg API Contest in our earlier coverage.

And the Ooyala application that won Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge is really a platform and not a simple mashup. Ooyala provides capability for improving delivery, monetization and analytics of online video, utilizing Amazon web services.

Stay Posted

Mashup and API contests are clearly a growing venue for developers and API providers. Use the ProgrammableWeb Mashup Contests Guide and the Contests blog page to keep posted on ongoing and upcoming contests. If you know of a contest that isn’t yet listed, click the “add it” link on that page to share the information with the PW community.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Amazon, Contests, Gov, Money at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

March 6th, 2008

Mashup Camp Set Free

Given the number of very interesting topics to discuss in this space it’s timely that Mashup Camp, now in it’s sixth run, is just around the corner in two weeks. And once again it’s free. Here are the details:

• When: March 17-20th
• Where: Mountain View, CA, at the Computer History Museum where the first camp took place two years ago.
• Cost: Free. Just like the first Camp, registration to Mashup Camp 6 is free. Also free is the food (breakfast and lunch) as well as the entertainment.
• Who: As you can see on the initial Who’s Coming list it’s a diverse group including mashup developers (independent and enterprise), analysts, VCs, tool providers, and the people actually building the APIs at places like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft.
• How and What: Follows an unconference format that allows the attendees to define the agenda and lead the discussions which results in a high signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion topics range from the technical to business strategy (see the first Camp wiki for examples). The first two days are the Mashup University and the second two are the unconference. Raymond Yee, a lecturer at University of California Berkeley and author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups, will teach the Introduction to Mashups class.
• Extra feature: The always popular Best Mashup Contest where developers can win a 17″ MacBook Pro. At past Camps the competition has lead to some notable winning mashups like WeatherBonk (which has since been acquired by the Weather Channel), The Hype Machine (our profile), and PodBop (shown below, our profile).

You can see more of our coverage of past Mashup Camps here.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Events at 11:40 AM | No Comments »

March 4th, 2008

Mashup Nonprofits, Do Good, Win Money

Create social change with your unique mashup idea. That’s the pitch to mashup developers from the folks at NetSquared for their NetSquared Mashup Challenge. NetSquared is a project from Tech Soup to facilitate the adoption of social web tools by nonprofits and NGOs. This is an ambitious effort and over $100,000 in prize money is at stake. There are three parts to the NetSquared Challenge:

• Nonprofits are invited to post ideas on “what change they are trying to make, as well as the information and data sources they believe can be joined to help illustrate their mission’s point. For example, you might be trying to illustrate the correlation between childhood asthma rates and Superfund sites.” You can see the current list of proposals here.
• Then the NetSquared team “will reach out to friendly collaborators who spend their days working with Web stuff to help translate your change into a Mashup project.”
• And then there’s actual mashup development itself. To help facilitate this piece, Google is hosting a hackathon at the Googleplex on March 7th in Mountain View where Google engineers, product and project managers will be on hand to make these mashups a reality.

The deadline for submissions is March 14th and the top 20 projects will be announced on March 24th. Those top 20 finalists will be invited to the NetSquared Conference (N2Y3) in San Jose, CA May 27-28. All 20 projects at the conference will receive a share of $100,000 in grant money with the share determined by voting at the conference.

The winner of last year’s NetSquared contest was MapLight.org. We’ve covered their efforts with citizen watchdogs earlier and have profiled their MapLight API. MapLight is a grantee of the the Sunlight Foundation who last year hosted their own worthwhile competition, the Mashup Congress Contest. The winning mashup in that case was Unfluence (our profile), which used the Follow the Money API to shed light on campaign finance via an interactive network map of state level political contribution data.

This is one of a variety of contests happening at the moment and you can see more on our Mashup Contests Guide.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Nonprofit at 3:07 AM | 5 Comments »

December 10th, 2007

Ooyala Wins $100K Amazon API Prize

Last Thursday at Amazon headquarters in Seattle, in a bid to win what might be the biggest web services-related prize to date, teams from 7 companies using Amazon Web Services APIs competed for $100K in the AWS Startup Challenge. As we covered earlier it was a tough competition with over 900 entrants and these finalists presented not just to Amazon representatives but venture capitalists from around the country including Bay Partners, Blue Run Ventures and Battery Ventures. And the winner? Ooyala, a startup focused on improving delivery, monetization and analytics of online video (see our full Ooyala mashup profile here).

As the grand prize winner, Ooyala will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.com. You can see all good concise video summaries of each finalist on Amazon’s site. What Amazon APIs does Ooyala use? Lots. Here’s what they use and how:

• Amazon EC2 as a computing platform for video and analytics processing
• Amazon S3 for storage and conent delivery
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service for payments
• Amazon Simple Queue Service for some of their video processing
• Amazon Mechanical Turk for marketing research and even choosing their logo

Read the rest of “Ooyala Wins $100K Amazon API Prize” »

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, BestMashups, Contests, Popular at 3:19 AM | No Comments »

November 21st, 2007

Amazon Picks Finalists for $100K Prize

As we reported earlier, the Amazon Web Services team is offering over $100,000 worth of prizes in their AWS Startup-Challenge and yesterday they announced the 7 finalists. Each of the entries are leveraging the Amazon APIs like EC2, S3 and Mechanical Turk to build their businesses. Amazon is going to fly these finalists to an evening event at their headquarters in Seattle to present their idea to a judging panel, VCs and Amazon executives. Here’s a rundown of the entries.

• WeoGeo: “Creates a one-stop marketplace for mapping using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.” See our full WeoGeo profile here.



• Ooyala: “Delivers a high quality interactive video experience with specific tools for content owners, advertisers and viewers. Ooyala is built on top of AWS’ utility computing services, Amazon EC2, S3, and SQS. Amazon EC2 is used in video development, processing and production while Amazon S3 is used for content delivery and back-up.”
• Brainscape.org: Is using Amazon web services as infrastructure underlying their “engine for measuring the networks in the brain.”
• Justin.tv: “Operates a massively scalable live video platform serving about 500,000 video streams per day. Their custom server software, Python Media Server, has been written from scratch to perform optimally on lightweight Amazon EC2 instances.”
• Commerce360: “Uses advanced mathematics and statistical analysis in their ClickEquations product to optimize paid and organic search campaigns.”
• UserTesting.com: “Provides quick and cheap website usability testing. Website owners can access a network of pre-screened testers who are articulate and observant and who meet specified demographics.”
• MileMeter: “Is an innovative insurance start-up that will offer “auto insurance buy the mile”. With MileMeter, drivers will be able to pre-pay auto insurance based on the number of odometer miles.”

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Contests, Shopping at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 25th, 2007

Smart Editor Wins Hackday Prize

Here’s an interesting mashup concept: Smart Editor, a rich text editor that uses web APIs to gather potentially relevant data from the web as you type. It gets web search results to inform you about related stuff on the net, related news happening around the world, Flickr photos to help you visualize, and Amazon product recommendations. It is built with the YUI Toolkit and four APIs: the Flickr API, the Yahoo Term Extraction API, the Yahoo Search API, and the Amazon E-Commerce API.

This mashup won the “Best Self Expression hack” at the Yahoo Hackday in Bangalor India earlier this month with judges that included Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Yahoo has had good success with their Hack Day events (see our earlier coverage on Yahoo Hacks Become Yahoo Products) and continues to do so with this international edition.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, Yahoo at 12:17 AM | 3 Comments »

September 27th, 2007

3 Mashup Contests End This Week

If you check our Mashup Contests Guide you’ll see there have been lots of new updates lately. Some contests have closed, others updated and a few are about to end. There are 6 contests underway at the moment with 3 of them ending them this week:

• Tibco Ultimate Mashup Contest: You can see more about this in our news coverage last month. It’s in support of their PageBus product and prizes include a 50 Inch Plasma HDTV and 30GB Video iPod.
• SharedBook Open API Challenge: The SharedBook API lets you create custom printed books from online content. Create a mashup with it and have a chance to win an OpenMoko phone, an iPhone or $500 cash. Winners will be announced on October 15th.
• TeleAtlas Maps in Apps 2007: Open to all applications using TeleAtlas data, “This contest is for consumer and business applications that are not LBS focused, but include mapping or location as a functionality enhancement.” Prizes include $25,000 cash, $50,000 in mapping data; 2 runners-up get $10,000 cash and $20,000 map data. (One related update on this one comes from ProgrammableWeb sponsor WHERE who have now partnered with Tele Atlas to allow mobile GPS entries in their contest to also be submitted to the Tele Atlas competition. Double your chances.)

And as quick API directory update, we just added a few new APIs yesterday which brings the total up to 520 API’s in the listings.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests at 4:41 AM | 1 Comment »

September 24th, 2007

Win $100K in New Amazon Contest

In the latest, and perhaps largest, entry into the world of mashup compeitions comes the Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge. The AWS team is “searching for the next hot start-up that is leveraging AWS to build its infrastructure and business”.

As the AWS team announced they will award a “first-place prize of $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits, mentoring sessions from an AWS technical expert, and an investment offer from Amazon.com. Four second-place winners will receive $5,000 in AWS credits and all qualified contestants receive up to $25 in service credits”. Judging will be based on “originality and creativity of the idea, likelihood of long-term success, how well it addresses a need in the marketplace, and implementation of pay-as-you-use Amazon Web Services. Finalists will be announced in November and Amazon will produce a video of each finalist to post on aws.amazon.com where the community can vote for their favorite start-up.” The deadline for entries is October 28th.

With the recent addition of the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (original news coverage here) we now have 12 Amazon Web Services listed.

Besides the new infrastructure services like the EC2 API and the S3 API, Amazon’s mainstay E-Commerce API remains very popular. We have 182 shopping mashups built with it including the recently added Price Cut Review shopping service that shows only Amazon products that are half the retail price or lower.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Contests, Shopping at 12:52 AM | 1 Comment »

August 2nd, 2007

Tibco’s Ajax Mashup Contest

No sooner did we outline ongoing mashup contests than Tibco launch their own contest, this one called the Ultimate Ajax Challenge. The competition is in support of their new PageBus product. We’ve now added this to our Contests page where there are 4 ongoing mashup contests.

PageBus builds on the company’s core strength in enterprise messaging with a product that’s “a message bus implemented in JavaScript that enables disparate Ajax elements in a Web page to broadcast and listen for events and messages published on topic names.” Their contest site includes a live mashup that demonstrates PageBus via a stock selector application.

Tibco has donated the core of PageBus to the OpenAjax Alliance. As they note: “You might consider the OpenAjax Hub as a leaner version of PageBus only in so far as publish and subscribe APIs go, but richer in relation to other Ajax library interoperation infrastructure.”

As we noted earlier this week the mashup tools market is quite competitive. Contests are another way to try and win the hearts and minds of developers. Our Contests page now shows there have been over 30 mashup contests in the past two years.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Enterprise, Tools at 12:33 AM | 1 Comment »

July 23rd, 2007

Mashup Camp 4 Wrapup

Another eventful Mashup Camp wrapped-up on Thursday with announcement of the winners of both the traditional Speed Geeking competition as well as the new Best Business Mashup contest. The first place prize for the now classic Speed Geeking contest went to the creators of video aggregation service chime.tv, Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta. For McKnight this was a return to the mashup podium as it was his PodBop that won the top prize back at the first Mashup Camp. More details on this winning mashup including video on ZDNet.

Read the rest of “Mashup Camp 4 Wrapup” »

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Enterprise, Events, Tools at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »