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Last.fm Hack Day 2008

Earlier this month Last.fm held their first annual Hack Day where the pubic was invited to come show off their programing skillz in a room with other geeks and the Last.fm API. Winners are now listed in a shout out on Last.fm’s Blog.

My fave is the Perceptron’s Where To Live mashup that tells you where the best place to live is based on the current tour routing of your favorite artists.

 

Last.fm Hackday 2008 recap

2008 In Review: Data Portability

Things blew wide open on the data portability front this year. Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace all launched major platform revisions allowing for exchange of information and authentication across their properties. Data Mashups are more abundant and popular as ever. Young companies understand that not having a data exchange play built into your platform now represents a loss of potential value and monetization opportunity. We are at an important inflection point.

Chris Saad gives a great end of the year overview as to where things currently stand in the world of data portability.

 

Other Links:

Twitter and Google’s Friend Connect

CitySearch welcomes logins with your Facebook credentials

Schwartz Wordle

Hypebot’s Music 2.0 By The Numbers

Sometimes there’s nothing like a nice compact list of lists. “Best-of” lists of lists are even better. Hypebot’s Bruce Houghton has collected a very nice survey of Music 2.0 tools, best practices, tools and deals that have appeared on his blog in 2008.

Highlights:

• 5 Lies Indie Musicians Tell Themselves
• Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0 - This was written back in May and almost nothing has changed.
• A list of 5 Unlikely Music Industry Heroes
• 100 Free & Affordable High A Low Tech Music Promotion Tips - It’s ready for an update, but this post remains one of Hypebot’s all time most popular.
• Top 10 Indie Music Marketing Tools.  There are too many new sites and services. These are where you need to spend most of your time.
• 5 Free Music Business eBooks. Not bad at a time when cash is tight.
• Top 10 Reasons Radio Stations Are Bleeding Money. A new post from our resident music philosopher Kyle Bylin.
• 5 Selfish Reasons Every Musician Should Rejoice That Barack Obama Is Our Next President
• The 10 Biggest Deals In Mobile & Digital Music and these are just the beginning…

Trends for 2009: GeoData for fun and profit.

Sean Gorman first blipped the world’s radar in 2003 when his “tedious and unimportant” graduate thesis for George Mason University caught the eye of the Federal government as a potential national security threat. Gorman had married public data about business locations with the layouts of major internet backbones.

This being the post Mitnick era the Feds decided rather than shutting down the research they’d help fund it. The CIA’s incubator In-Q-Tel bought into Gorman’s FortusOne for $5.45M in 2007 which helped fund the open source wonder GeoCommons. The site allows you to quickly search, filter and overlay a wide variety of Geographically mapped data sets. Also allows users to upload their own sets too - either privately or sharable by the public.

The GeoCommons system opens up whole new areas of dimensionality to novice users - and shines as the model for the next generation data federation systems cropping up this year on the web.

Gorman gave a great overview at the 2008 Web 2.0 Conference. Turns out FortusOne isn’t particularly revenue driven at the moment (surprise surprise). It’s good to have Big Brother onboard as an equity partner.

• GeoCommons Finder - data browser
• GeoCommons Maker - map data mashup tool
• FortusOne Profile
• Mapufacture / FortusOne merger announcements