Somewhere in Austin, someone is likely already organizing the lanyards for the thousands of SXSW badges for the techies next month. And somewhere in Brighton, the small team behind Lanyrd is likely working hard to make sure its social conference directory is ready for SXSW and all the other conferences that overlap their way through June and beyond. And for any developers wanting to build on top of Lanyrd, you’re wondering about the Lanyrd API. It’s late. And coming soon. Maybe.
Developers living in and around Copenhagen, mark your calendars. The GOTO Copenhagen conference is now in its second year running after a successful event in 2011. The Conference brings together developers, leads, managers and architects for three days of technical sessions across various tracks like languages, front-end development, architecture and many more. The conference is followed by a two day Training program on various topics that you can register to attend, too.
The CleanWeb Hackathon wrapped up this weekend in New York City, with the goal of building apps that explore sustainable business models leveraging the mobile and social web, challenging developers on what they can do in 24 hours with utility, transport and smart grid datasets, and APIs.
College hackathons have proliferated on the northeast over the past two years, from HackNY to Startup Weekend Princeton, to PennApps, which the Dining Philosophers hold at the University of Pennsylvania on a weekend early in each semester.
This year theme was simplicity; taking a complicated app and making it easier. Of the 42 demos presented Sunday afternoon (livestream archive here), here are some of the coolest hacks that took full advantage of available APIs.
On a cool morning a group of hackers slowly filter into a downtown Philadelphia storefront. The whiteboard wall quickly fills up, as a few work on finding an accurate way to track the progress of a single chosen bus line. With phone in hand, others build systems providing schedules and stops via SMS and voice. A few keystrokes and another starts tracking the positions of trains, while across the the room, transportation information flickers across a screen, controlled simply by a pair of hands moving through the air.
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.
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