Mashup Camp 2

By Thomas Steiner. Written on Fri Jul 14 2006. Work

Mashup Camp 2

On July 12th and 13th 2006 I attended the second Mashup Camp in Mountain View, California in the Computer History Museum, just a 10 minute walk away from Google. A short and handy definition of mashup is available on the programmable web homepage. The atmosphere on the camp was very geeky and '2.0'-y, very open and democratic.

A good example of this atmosphere is the schedule board for the sessions and discussions. It is kind of funny that a hightech conference is organized on paper. I think there are some fields where computers never will be able to replace paper. Anyway, the sessions people offered where posted on a schedule board, and then re-arranged on demand. People had a quite good feeling of how many people their session would attract, and thus scheduled their sessions in the appropriate rooms.

People showed off a lot of really cool mashups:

Frucall, a free voice call best price finder
Weather Bonk, a mashup of Google Maps and weather forecast feeds
The in my opinion funniest mashup was an image captcha consisting of a 3x3 matrix of hot or not images. In order to pass as a human being, the user had to click the three hottest images. It worked surprisingly well. However, the captcha might not be politically correct…

I presented a mashup of Google AdWords and Google Checkout called Checkout APIlitAx. The relationship of AdWords and Checkout is quite obvious. My example was a t-shirt shop where a shop vendor could automatically create ads based on his inventory list. The ads were then linked to products of the vendor's inventory. The mashup uses the APIlitAx infrastructure to perform AdWords operations, and accesses the Checkout API via PHP. I will shortly release it as an open source project.

Images from wiki.mashupcamp.com and flickr.com