I’m really excited to participate in StartupWeekend in Hamburg tomorrow, where 140 people will come together to build two web startups. The whole progress is crowdsourced - attendees are invited to pitch ideas, then two ideas are selected and developed over two days in teams that cover business and finance, programming, graphics, marketing and legal aspects.
At the end of the weekend, everybody becomes a shareholder in the companies, and management will be elected, which will receive a little seed funding to hopefully get off the ground. I’m moderately skeptical if this will work, but can’t wait to find out! Now on to contemplate about startup ideas… 
Update (05/19): Hey, my idea made it into the top 5! These are the two final projects:
- indawo.de, a platform that helps event organizers to find suitable locations - for both corporate and private events such as weddings.
- lockerlernen.de, a community for tutorial videos targeted at pupils, where I took care of the video portion.
In the final meeting, indawo.de was chosen as the project that will be incorporated with a 60:40 vote, and everybody that attended is now a shareholder. lockerlernen.de was not short of praise and the team members are looking to incorporate it as well.
Programmers and graphic designers were incredibly scarce, so the implementations are at a very early demo stage. Most attendees are now back at their day jobs, but each project has a committed core group that will hopefully drive these projects forward in the nexts months.
I learnt a lot about crowdsourcing today. While I often felt that the sheer number people was slowing things down considerably and there were many disagreements, we ended up with two ideas that I can see surviving. Thanks a to the organizers Cem and Jason for pulling this off!
Read more feedback here, and Flickr evidence here!
Filed under StartupWeekend, Hamburg, lockerlernen and indawo. |
I’m in Beijing for WWW2008 where I just presented my diploma thesis, DBpedia Mobile at the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) Workshop.
Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map containing information about nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Geographic locations are currently available for 300,000 of DBpedia’s 2.18 million “things”.
Starting from the map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into DBpedia and other interlinked datasets such as GeoNames, Revyu, EuroStat and Flickr.
I will write a bit more about it when I get a chance, but for now here are the slides:
More information:
Update: Another Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb!
Filed under DBpedia, Mobile, LDOW2008 and WWW2008. |
I’ve been pretty busy putting together a webcast interface for Leica Microsystems featuring Cover Flow in AJAX. We thought that it was so cool that we released the latter under Creative Commons.
Main screen:
Help overlay:
Live demo built with Slideflow:
Filed under Job and AJAX. |
DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia and publishes it as RDF. This allows for incredible queries against Wikipedia data, such as Soccer player with tricot nr. 11, playing for a club having a stadium with >40.000 seats, born in a country with >10M inhabitants.
I recently added support for geo-coordinates to DBpedia and built the flickr™ wrappr, a proof-of-concept work that provides photos for a given Wikipedia article using geo-coordinates and multilingual labels. The benefit: It is a fairly efficient and accurate way for a machine to find a picture of something. It is now part of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project.
I really like the pictures it finds for the Eiffel Tower:
Update (04/10/2008): ReadWriteWeb says "This is pure geek hotness", and Tim Berners-Lee says “This is a neat addition”!
Update: Mashup of the day at ProgrammableWeb (10/17/2007) and at Mashup Awards (01/10/2008)!
Filed under DBpedia, flickr and RDF. |
Seemingly, a lot of money can be made with rather useless Facebook applications these days. So I set out to see what it would take to attain exponential growth rates and did a Flash port of a Fortune Cookie site I wrote in JavaScript back in 2003. The application did grow exponentially in the first days, but now its growth is rather linear with 8,300 users as of today, and 100 new users per day. Altura Ventures, who invests in Facebook applications, estimates that this is worth $2,400 already. Can you believe it?
Its home on Facebook is here, and here’s a preview:
Update: Currently broken due to the highest-voted bug on Facebook.
Filed under Facebook Application. |
I finally found the time to put my Outlook-based spam filter SpamIntelligence on SourceForge. It contains many C++ classes to Outlook’s kludgy MAPI interfaces, so it should be really useful for anybody developing an Outlook plugin. I am discontinuing its development since I’m moving away from Windows development.
Filed under Microsoft, Spam and Outlook. |
It looks like Microsoft may soon own Yahoo!. But how in the world are they going to combine their brands?
Solution 1:
Solution 2:
(Microsoft! logo courtesy of logo54.com)
Filed under Microsoft and Yahoo!. |
Yes, I made it back! And now it’s back to the books. I finally uploaded my Paris pictures (to see more, befriend me on flickr).
Filed under Paris and Berlin. |
Recently got back from ACM SAC 2007, where we (FU Berlin) presented our paper on Multidimensional Querying in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Good conference and a very interesting country. Here are some nice pictures.
Filed under Seoul, Korea, ACM, SAC 2007, University and OLAP. |
Slides
