Tokyo-based publication and human resources company Recruit held a presentation and ceremony event introducing the fifth edition’s prize winners of the Mash-up Awards[J] contest last weekend. More than 50 tech companies sponsored the event and their founders and directors served as the juries to evaluate nominees. An applicant for the contest must use one or multiple APIs provided by those companies to develop a brand new mash-up service. 346 entries were reportedly confirmed in the edition.
The picture shown above is courtesy of the contest organizer’s Ustream live programming.
The excellent invention prizes go to the following five finalists:
- Social Combat V[J] (developed by MEX) – won the grand prix
Media Extension, a group of three web developers working with an ad production company, introduced a social application of duke-out. The app allows you to set your character by picking up parameters from social network services such as Twitter and mixi.
- Cast Oven (developed by 100kw-sgss) – won the juries’ special prize
This microwave oven will show you a YouTube video which has an exact length of the time enough to heat a food that you wish to cook. You no longer get bored to wait to cook it up. This work’s concept is to put the time for content consumption in niche segments of our daily lives. The Adobe AIR-app picks up the signal of telling you the time length from the microwave and finds an appropriate video from YouTube.
- OpenSocial Dashboard (developed by stomita)
It is a web application that shows you a variety of OpenSocial gadgets. You can embed this on your blog or website, and you may have multiple dashboards and switch each of them to the other depending on your needs, for instance, for private or on business.
- radioooo[J] (developed by mizzusano)
This is an Adobe Air-app and works with Twitter and YouTube. The app will find YouTube videos that you and other radioooo users have requested and play them one by one. All users can hear the same sounds and share the same experience at the same time, that is a very similar user experience which we have when listening to the radio. When you like a song playing on it, just press stand! or clap! button on the app, that will transmit a Twitter message with a hash tag which allows the other users to share your feelings such as “stand”-ing or “clap”-ing as though you were at a live house while listening.
- Travatar (developed by 1Pac.Inc.)
If you install this app on your iPhone, your avatar in the app will be able to move to someone’s iPhone when the two of the iPhone are physically closed each other. The avatar repeatedly keeps moving from someone’s iPhone to the other’s, and as a result, your avatar can be carried even to outside Japan while you are unaware. Each device of the iPhone does not communicate with the others directly (so, it doesn’t use BlueTooth technology), every device transmits its geographical attribute to the server to learn if any other is located nearby.
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Masaru IKEDA