January 1st, 2008

Wii Earth 3D Mashup

If you want a hacking diversion on your New Year’s holiday, here’s a mashup-related idea: turn your Nintendo Wii into a controller for Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D maps. Our first Mashup of the Day for 2008 comes from this article by Brian Peek that shows you how to do it along with accompanying video and source code in C# and VB. (And for more Wii hacking, see the earlier Wii Enterprise Remote).

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Hardware, Mapping, Microsoft at 4:35 AM | No Comments »

February 7th, 2007

The First Telephony Mashup Contest

As you can see on the /contests page here, there have been lots of mashup contests on lots of topics held in the past two years. This week there’s an entirely new form of mashup contest for developers: the O’Reilly Media and StrikeIron Telephony Mashup Contest. What is it and how do you compete? Here are the details from the announcement:

O’Reilly Media and StrikeIron are proud to announce the first ever Telephony Mashup Contest. This new contest provides a stage for developers to demonstrate their creative skills using emerging telephony technologies such as PBX, IVR, and Web Service APIs.

Read the rest of “The First Telephony Mashup Contest” »

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Events, Hardware, Telephony at 12:01 AM | 4 Comments »

October 3rd, 2006

Hack Day at Yahoo

Sounds like everyone had a great time at Yahoo!’s Hack Day. About 400 people spent 24 hours on the Yahoo! campus of not just hacking (as expected), but also an unannounced 90 minute performance from Beck. See this post from Chad Dickerson, the Hack Day Blog, and this news story for more (in the latter it’s all referred to as “Computer coding savants fueled by pizza, beer and rock music”).

According to emcee Mike Arrington there were over 50 projects in the hacking competition and the winner was Blogging in Motion, a hardware-and-software mashup using a camera, a handbag, a pedometer, and the Flickr API in order to automatically blog photos every few steps.

Oh yes, and Yahoo! release two new APIs and announced a third:

• Browser Based Authentication or BBAuth: which is as they describe “a generic mechanism that will allow users to grant 3rd party web-based applications access their Yahoo! data…it possible to use Yahoo! as a single sign-on for your site, thus removing a barrier to entry for a whole lot of people (over 200 million to be exact).” Looks like a very useful service, somewhat similar to Google’s authentication service released earlier this year. More from Jeremy Zawodny and Dan Theurer
• Yahoo! Photos API: This new API uses the “Enables Yahoo! users to access and manipulate their photos through third-party applications and devices. They can use Yahoo! Photos Web Services to upload photos, create and modify photos and albums, share photos with others, search photos, and more.” And it builds on the BBauth services above.
• Yahoo! Mail API: Announced but not yet released. Should be interesting.

Congratulations to Chad and the folks from Yahoo!’s dev team on putting together an excellent event and to continuing to roll-out more useful APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Contests, Events, Hardware, News, Yahoo at 12:15 AM | 2 Comments »

September 25th, 2006

Rhapsody Programmable Jukebox

Over the past couple weeks the folks at RealNetworks’ Rhapsody have made some product announcements which have an API component, but that API piece hasn’t received a lot of press yet. Most of the initial buzz has been about the new devices like the upcoming SanDisk Sansa and the Sonos 2 home stereo device (with this positive review from Walt Mossberg). For Real, this is all part of their new Rhapsody DNA initiative — a combination of technology platform, DRM, partnerships and marketing. Here’s the Sonos setup:

The new APIs come into play because these devices integrate with it directly, no computer needed. So it becomes a device-to-web-API model. As they note in their blog “Now that we’ve built this API, Rhapsody can be easily extended to other embedded audio systems and solutions without involving a PC at all. The web service API is the cornerstone of DNA.” For example, the Sonos device can “browse, search and stream” the 2.5 million track Rhapsody catalog using this new SOAP-based API. The API can be used from other network devices, as is done with Sonos desktop client software. See Rhapsody Web Services blog posts here and here for more.

Also, see our Rhapsody API entry here for details on their existing services.

There are a not a lot of details about the new APIs available yet, but Real looks quite serious about creating a programmable jukebox in the cloud.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Hardware, News at 6:30 PM | No Comments »