This one's a cracker!

Yet again an 'open to interpretation' brief went out to the cool people of the office (devs, duh), and yet again we're super stoked about the outcome!

Brief was loosely around using external data/api and aggregate something cool, which in non-techie speak simply means using content from somewhere like Twitter, Facebook etc and create something new. No real need to go into too much depth there. Instead, let's jump into the submissions!

VJ Melbourne:

Andrew Greig

Andy created a Twitter aggregator that sucks in VJI employee's tweets and shapes them in a cool way. Extra bonus points for multiple breakpoints for iPads, mobiles etc (resize your browser)

 

 Dan Napoleoni

Nappers created what might be the fatal end to free music on YouTube. It combines last.fm API with YouTube to create an application where you can search for artists and albums and get served up relevant videos in a playlist. Good job ruining YouTube for us Dan! ;)

 

 Dave Bui

Dave created a funky looking 3D carousel using only CSS and Javascript that sucks in data from holden.com and serves up the content arranged by vehicle (CHROME ONLY)

 

David Wu

Unfortunately, it's hard to visualize Dave's submission. It's an iPad app where you search for location that aggregates content from Wikipedia and cross-references that with google maps to weed out anything that's not a 'location'.

After that, it serves up a map of the location, alongside wiki facts about it and a photo feed with all photos tagged within a certain distance of the location. Will work hard to get it up and available somewhere.

 

 

VJ Sydney:

Alice Athens

Alice took the creepy approach and made a 'stalker' app that gathers checkin's on Facebook from your mates and maps them to.. a map. You can go through the places where they've been and see what they've been up to. 

 

Matt Hobbs

Hobbs went all out and created a music visualization tool in HTML using data from soundcloud and relaying that through node.js. Freakishly cool and you should definitely check it out. (CHROME ONLY)

 

Riccardo Pierantonietti

Ricc, in a similar fashion, used the soundcloud API to create a visualization and queue tool for music!

 

Judging was done by myself and Johann De Boer, one of our data analysts (perfect for the job!). It became abundantly clear that we rated things quite differently, but that's what the celebrity judge is all about. 

Winner of this round was David Wu for his wiki/google mash-up app. As reward for his work, we picked up one of these badboys: http://www.parrotar.com/. I'm sure footage from that crazy thing will filter through soon enough.

 

That's it for this round ;) Until next time!