Daily Archives: July 13, 2006

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 1 – wait, there’s more!

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The excellent unconference format makes the entire conference something of a networking session.  Still,  it’s great to have a few beers with folks who make the internet … so darn interesting.

I always enjoy talking with the brilliant Adam Sah who brings plenty of Google gadget enthusiasm to the mashup mix and I’m sure will have some great stuff to show us tomorrow during the last session. Also really enjoyed meeting mashup and housingmaps.com  legend Paul Rademacher  (whoa – not to be confused with this Paul Rademacher, who is dead).

Paul’s early mashup of Craigslist and Google maps (before there was a maps API no less!)  helped usher in the notion that mashups are a very useful, great way to mix data in innovative ways.   Had a great chance to talk about some travel mashing ideas with Adam and Paul.   There’s a hurricane of real time road data at the transportation departments but it’s non-trivial to pull even a fraction of that in effectively.   Mashups to the rescue?  Maybe.

Also got to meet the famous ex-googler blogger Mark Jen who was fired by Google for … blogging!    He works over at Plaxo now where he won’t get fired because … he wrote the blogging policy!  Very nice and sharp guy.

Mashup Camp 2 – Brain Pain, but the good kind

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Mashup Camp 2, day 1 wraps up with  here at the Computer Science Museum.

Despite some good presentations, I think the Speed Geeking Session was the best part as in Mashup Camp 1, but it seemed the mashups in the competition are not quite as strong though there are several good ones and I only saw about 15 today.  David Schorr’s   WeatherBonk, which almost won Mashup Camp 1, is back and better than ever.   He’s got GolfBonk as well which is very clever.   The best viral marketing idea was a mash of maps and myspace called Frappr.com

Frucall‘s callback with shopping data was neat and Intel’s up to some great stuff with their shopping mashup that takes a *picture* of the UPC and fetches shopping data.     Also strong in this space SecretPrices.com

Some of these are too complex to digest, especially on the tiny screens some people were using to show off their applications (Marc, dude – you call that a screen?!) But his PeopleAggregator roll your own social network looked really promising in many ways.  Yobie’s online mega shop GoodStorm.com also needs a lot more than 5 minutes and has very powerful features.

Mashup Camp 2 – Speed Geeking!

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Michael: Chunklove  registry finder
Nassar?  Cell phone to shopping assistant for pricing
?  Ultra mobile PC, pictures of barcodes, etc.
? Podcasts and newsfeeds
Jeff Marshall – new system for
Bart – Traincheck.com train times to cell phone
Dave – Bungee Labs.  Web 2.0 “Free Fusion” the ultimate mashup.
Fisher, Elephant Drive – web storage
Curt – Music Video Maker Mashup
John – AOL – ChefMoz, a restaurant Mashup
Chris – Eventful.   Flickr tagging by event.
Mark – SecretPrices.com   Shopping mashup
? – Mega Map Mashup  Yahoo+Google
?
Yobie Benjamin – GoodStorm, Mecommerce
? Malguru scrapes all travel data into one space.
Tom – Acting manager of FLEX working group
Weatherbonk.com and GolfBonk.com
David with AOL – Open directory mashup
MindJet – 10 search APIs mashed to desktop, research results.

Note to developer dudes – it helps if you speak c-l-e-a-r-l-y.   Fast is OK, but clear is essential.

Mashup Camp 2 – search session

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Dorai Thodla of IMorph led an excellent search discussion this morning about the challenges of bringing more context into the search results.   He’ll post at the WIKI this afternoon.  Google noted that their new API is allowing a lot more integration and flexibility than it used to, and I think Yahoo is moving in this direction as well where the commercial use distinctions are breaking down in favor of … innovation!  Hey, innovation is a good thing.

But in my opinion the most interesting development in all in search is the Amazon Web Search platform which Jeff will be talking about this afternoon.     From my perspective Amazon is basically going to aggressively enable modest potential search competitors with big time search infrastructure.

Even if this fails to bring any great innovation to the table, I think it’s already helping to suggest that Google and Yahoo should continue to bring good APIs to the table and encourage search mashing.

Mashup Camp 2

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The technology providers have introduced themselves and now folks are pitching sessions. Note that unlike the play by play from Mashup University, I won’t be able to cover the flurry of information here at the main conference, a tsunami of ideas and innovation. The unconference model really brings out the good stuff.

Here are more resources:

Dan Farber 

Mashup Camp

Mashup Wiki

Programmable Web

I’m especially interested in sessions by Jeff – Amazon, Joseph – Plaxo, Adam – Google, Steve Microsoft Virtual Earth. IBM’s mashup maker sounds really neat.

Mashup Camp 2 – Begins

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It’s 8:30 and folks are arriving here at the Computer History Museum and thanks to Microsoft there’s great coffee, so it’s looking to be another exciting Mashup Camp.

Michael Arrington and Jeff Clavier “We love the smell of startups in the morning” are on the list so you know you are in the right place for Web 2.0 action and adventure.

Last night’s party at the Avante, thanks to Dave at StrikeIron was great. Lots of good discussions and demos of some great projects like:

Intel Mashup ? – I missed this one

GoodStorm.com Yobie is a clever guy with a good team so this is a company to watch.

Zend Frameworks John Herren was one of the most insightful programmers here last time. Zend is making it easier to mashup with their pool of code and services.

IBM Tessa demo’d koala, an internal IBM wiki tool with several very clever features. They may release this outside the company if the demand is there and that’s part of what she’ll be learning here at Mashup Camp. I was particularly interested in how Koala has employees tag themselves and each other as qualified in various areas, and then maps these tags to search for measures of “expertise”. I think this type of collective human intelligence is very promising, and the online environment makes it very easy and cheap to exploit it.

Eventful is doing great stuff and gave an excellent demo.  They are allowing people to put in “virtual” events, mostly from Second Life.    He noted that there is now overlap between the second life world and the real world as at SuperNova where second life folks could interact with the participants via webcams and a virtual meeting room.

StrikeIron demo’d a data nabbing spreadsheed with callback and a very interesting EBAY data application that plots sales and times, allowing optimization of keyword buys.