“Just Add Stuff” wins Stockholm Startup Weekend!
I didn’t have much expectations on Stockholm Startup Weekend as this was my first startup event, so I most definitely hadn’t planned to pitch an idea and win!
But I ended up with an amazing team and together we created the idea and website Just Add Stuff. This wasn’t exactly my original idea, but after hours of trying to find a way to make money out of a give-away-free-stuff website, we decided to build a white label classified ad system instead.
The idea is to let web communities and blogs have their own, niched, mini “Blocket” (like Craig’s list). For example, a downhill skiing community can let their members post ads for second hand trading of skiing equipment. The website can decide if they want to charge their users for the ads (this way sports clubs can add a revenue channel). We also support clustering, so a community can share ads within the same niche with other sites.
I had a great weekend, getting to know lots of amazing people, and I’ll definitely participate in more startup events!
No commentsVideosupport – for ShootItLive
ShootItLive makes it possible for photographers with wifi-enabled cameras to upload images and get them published on for example online news sites almost instantly. ShootItLive is used by for example Aftonbladet, the largest online news site in Sweden.
During February and March 2010 I added video support for ShootItLive. Technology used include Python, FFmpeg, ORMs such as SQLAlchemy and Elixir and frameworks such as Smisk.
FFmpeg
The FFmpeg version used is custom built to include x264-support. It’s tested for input formats avi, mov, mp4, wmv and flv and output formats flv, f4v and jpeg. Exiftool is used to extract exif information.
The system supports multiple output formats for a single input file, such as different video formats and poster frames (images).
Comments OffFacebook app experimenting
I haven’t had any reason to develop a full Facebook app yet, but since I was curious about their API I’ve been playing around with it. The SATS app was originally something I built years ago for my own webpage when I was a member of SATS (the gym). SATS’ search for classes didn’t have the interface I wanted, so I rearranged the search results a bit more to my liking. (It’s all ugly hacking, stripping data from an HTML result.) To my surprise, they haven’t changed their search functionality since then, so I ported the search to a Facebook app as an experiment. The app resides on my server and I rebuilt the whole front-end to return a JSON object with the data to show, then displaying it with FBML. I’d like to implement more of the existing search functionality, but as this has the status of being an ugly hack depending on SATS not rebuilding their search, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Oh, and I think the app is buggy in IE at the moment.
After writing the SATS app I got curious about Google App Engine and wanted to do some sort of Hello World to test connecting GAE to a Facebook app. I built a very simple function just to display your friend list as an XML file.
The reason for this is that many of my friends complained about not being able to trace the people disappearing from their friend lists. This is also a convenient way to get the user ids for your friends if you’re developing an application and need test data. I’m not allowed to save versions of friend lists due to Facebook API user terms, but this way the users can save versions of their list to compare.
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