MashupCamp – Too Bad I Missed it
I had coffee with Dave Nielsen of StrikeIron over the weekend. He gave me the download on MashupCamp which unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to attend.
For those of you who don’t know what to do with the term, mash-ups are a way of combining data available from one or several sources on the web into your own web-based application. A great examples is housingmaps.com, which combines the classified housing ads on craigslist.org with mapping data provided by Google Maps. These sites have become popular since large data owners have made their data available through APIs (see programmable web for a good listing and a lot more on mash-ups) and can therefore easily be integrated with 3rd party apps.
If you are interested in the business model aspects, I encourage you to go through the summary of Dave and Eleanor’s session on “Mash-ups and business models”here. Note that they did a few hand-raising excercises in the room and on the question “Do you have the intention to raise VC?” only 4 people answered yes, although almost 40 mash-up coders seem to have been in the room. And I think it is wise not to jump to raising VC money with mash-ups unless you have a clear vision how to build this into a large business, so I think this outcome is actually a good, no-hype sign and speaks for the quality of this unconference. Really, too bad I missed it.
There were a few awards at the end – you may want to check out podbop.org which won the audience award. The site let’s you search for concerts in your town and matches them with podcasts from the visiting bands so that you can get a taste of whats’on on this weekend. Flyspy was another one that people seemed to like. Flyspy is non-public yet, but Techcrunch has some screenshots.
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