Hackathons have been a staple in Silicon Valley tech culture for quite some time, but recently we have seen seeing hackathons evolve outside of the valley — from Los Angeles to Prague.
The format of the Hackathon is pretty straightforward: You bring together a group of developers in a room, give them a topic to code around, then they break into teams and begin hacking for usually from 24-72 hours. On the final day, theypresent what they’ve built. Winners usually go home with cash, prizes, and of course notoriety.
OpenChargeMap is a neat little service designed to help those with electric cars find places to charge up. With gas prices going the way they are, electrics are becoming a trendy alternative, and with the new Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf offering good choices for the average consumer, more and more people are going electric. If you’re one of those, however, there’s always a hitch: finding a place to “fill up”. Now you’re covered and with the OpenChargeMap API you can integrate the service into other things.
It seems that the API cleaning has not yet ended at Google. Awhile back, Google announced its decision to shut down its popular translation API, a decision that did not go down favourably with the users. Now Google Health API has been given a negative prognosis and Google PowerMeter API will soon run out of juice.
Onset, a supplier of data logging devices, just launched the HOBOlink® Web Services API, that enables anyone to easily build applications around weather, energy and environmental data gathered from the Onset HOBO® U30 monitoring systems, hardware you install in your environment which can share its status up to Onset’s system.
Athletic shoe and apparel giant Nike recently announced that it is looking for a fellow to help ignite an open data revolution within the company. Nike’s vice President of Sustainability, Hannah Jones, announced the fellowship and a partnership with Code for America during a session at SXSW 2011. Nike has exposed internal data in the past and hopes to create a situation where other companies might follow suite for a greener future.
The biggest value that WattzOn is offering through its WattzOn API is access to its “Embodied Energy Database” (EED). This database seeks to detail the amount of energy required to manufacture, transport, use, and dispose of all our stuff. The idea is that if we knew the embodied energy in all the items we use, we could make better consumption choices, avoiding those items with unexpectedly high embodied energy.
In today’s globalised world most products you see on the store shelf were probably made from parts sourced from all over the world. As we become more aware of the environmental impact of transporting these parts, it is important to have easily accessible information on how a final product comes together. Sourcemap is a project of the Media Lab at MIT, and it allows users to easily visualise what components go into a product, how they are shipped, and what the environmental impacts are.
Gnomedex, the annual tech conference in Seattle hosted by Chris Pirillo, and Microsoft Live Search, are teaming up to sponsor a developer’s contest dubbed “Will Code for Green” where judges will accept mashup entries in two categories: Economy and Ecology.
You may not be familiar with Green Thing, a web based service that inspires people to lead a greener life, but you should be. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories etc. from creative people and community members around the world, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do – and enjoy doing.
In her recent article “Using Web2.0 tools for Environmental Activism”, Global Voices Online writer Juliana Rotich looks at how environmental activists are taking advantage of modern Web tools to share information and raise funds.
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