flickr™ wrappr

12Oct07

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:
flickr™ wrappr Screenshot

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)!

Animated Fortunes on Facebook

11Oct07

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.




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I'm a recent graduate in economics and business with a significant background in software development and streaming media. To learn more about me, check out my resume or my profiles on XING, LinkedIn and Facebook.