Microsoft Corp. and BT Group PLC, in their effort to encourage developers to create “network mashups” that merge telecommunications features such as voice and text messaging with Web 2.0 applications like mapping and search, have launched a competition called The Connected Services Sandbox contest.

The sponsors will give away prize money ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 in cash. To top that, if the mashup is used by any of the telecommunications companies, the developer would get a share of the revenue.

TopCoder Inc. will manage this event. Developers can sign up for the competition here. 

This is a great way to get people involved with “networking mashups” as that is something which I see very less of. You can see lot of mashups and the APIs used to develop them at ProgrammableWeb.com.

Source: Microsoft launches ‘mashup’ competition for developers

Popularity: 3% [?]

When Jack Fowler moved to San Diego to join his new job, he had limited commute options as he was new to the city and without car for sometime. He definitely wanted to stay closer to his work place which was downtown. His quest for a sublet or an apartment nearby his office was proving a painful exercise as he had to look up houses in San Diego downtown and once he found some decent posting he had to do a Google map lookup to find how close they were to his work place (outside 1-2 miles radius was a big no no). It was not a pleasant experience for him as after doing a map lookup he used to find that the house was not near his work place.

One of his dear friends suggested HousingMaps.com. To Jack’s amazement, the tool was very simple to use and saved him so much time and energy, besides getting him a house of his choice near his work place.

HousingMaps.com, created by Paul Rademacher, a 3-D graphic artist from Santa Clara, California, is a mashup that combines craigslist real estate listings(houses for sale, apartments for rent and sublets) with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities.

Jack could choose the city as San Diego, he opted for rental houses within a price range of $500-$1000 with any number of rooms (he had other options too but he went with default values). Here is what his search returned (click on image to get a bigger picture):

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Popularity: 2% [?]

ClearForest Semantic Web Services (SWS) is an experiment in deploying to the broader web community a portion of the high-end text-mining technology ClearForest has developed over the last decade.

ClearForest has developed a suite of language processing tools to extract meaning from text. Then they went ahead and implemented a web services layer on top of their suite of tools to expose the functionality as services to the general public.

Let me quote an example usage from their website which gives you a flavor of the power of this tool:

If you hand SWS a lengthy news article about, say, a corporate merger - here’s what you’ll get back in nice structured XML: 1) All of the people mentioned in the article, 2) all of the organizations mentioned, 4) all of the companies mentioned and 4) all geographies.

There are three ways to access ClearForest Semantic Web Services:

• Through the web interface. This is a good starting point to see how things work.
• Via web services. To get started with that see API Specifications.
• With Gnosis - very cool Firefox plug-in extension.

They had a mashup contest and here are some of the winning entries from there:

• http://www.optevi.net/newstracker (newstracker)
• http://www.hype-list.com (hype-list)
• http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees
• http://semanticsearcher.com

Popularity: 4% [?]

Is all the information on the internet overwhelming for you and you need to dig through tons of pages to find something that interests you?

Then Findory is for you. This Seattle, Washington based tiny startup company has created a personalization technology that builds a home page for each reader, recommending content based on what each person has read and what new content is published. They do the heavy lifting by crawling through the web and gathering content which suits your taste.

They also provide API to access their data by making parameterized URL requests over HTTP (REST). The results are returned in RSS format. The API specifications are as follows:

Specification

The API requires a base URL

http://rss.findory.com/rss/[Product][/Category]

where Product is one of {News, Blogs, Video, Podcasts, Favorites} and Category is an optional parameter where the category varies by product line (see the RSS Feeds page for a list).

The base URL can be followed by these optional parameters:

Some interesting examples of API usage are:

Popularity: 3% [?]