1000 Flowers Bloom

Mashup Camp 2 Winner - Weather Bonk

Weather Bonk won the best Mashup award from the MashupCamp conference.

See the bottom of this post from David Berlind. Hopefully David will put up a full post in a conference roundup.

This is (literally) a big vote of confidence by the developer community in Silicon Valley. The way the conference works is that therebout 30 websites that demo to the 400 attendees at the conference and each attendee is allowed to vote for one and only one site that they think is the best. 

I know that Dave Schorr has put a ton of time and effort into Weather Bonk and it’s great to see him be recognized.

Mashup Camp 2

Unfortunately I was only able to spend a couple of hours at Mashup Camp 2 this time. I did check out a few cool mashups that were there.

StrikeIron had one that allowed you to pull exchange data via webservices into Excel.
HotCaptcha was a very clever mashup that made you prove you were human by picking the hot girls (or boys) out of a series of pictures.
WeatherBonk is the best weather / maps mashup out there by a mile. In full disclosure my friend Dave Schorr did this but I think I'd say it was awesome regardless.

Thank you to Dave Berlind and Doug Gold for putting these together.

Cooqy Review - interesting interface into EBay

The founder of Cooqy dropped me an email asking me to check out his site. To be honest I don't normally do this kind of thing because there are lots of other sites out there that handle reviewing new sites and products better than I ever could.

However, I am interested in how people are using APIs that are being provided and I think that this is a really full featured example of taking APIs and running with it to create something cool. On top of that I am looking for a new laptop bag so I thought I'd give it a spin and see what it was like.

I think the interface for Cooqy is interesting. It's a Flash UI that provides all sorts of goodness like better search capabilities to find what you want better. I suspect that if you're an EBay fanatic (and there are lots of them out there) that you will really enjoy that. Things like automatically showing a zoomed element of a picture is cool as well.

In the end I did end up putting in a bid on Cooqy for a laptop bag so we'll see if I win!

My tactical suggestions for Cooqy:

• searched for roomba and couldn't find anything but found it on the Ebay site
• that teeny tiny scroll box you leave for descriptions needs to be bigger, much too small right now.

On a big picture level:
I'm not sure I understand clearly why I want to use Cooqy versus going direct to EBay. Is it that the UI is so much better that I would use it over EBay? Are there other benefits I'm missing?