Last.fm has announced it will host its first ever “Hack Day” on Sunday, December 14th at an undisclosed East London location.
At the event, which is hosted in partnership with CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site, web developers will be invited to utilize Last.fm’s free open source web services in a one-day competition to build a new Last.fm application.
The winning developer will receive a grand prize of £1000 , with additional prizes for the competition’s runners-up including Xbox 360s.
As the first “Hack Day” hosted by Last.fm and partner CodePlex, programmers will come together at Last.fm’s East London neighbourhood - dubbed Silicon Roundabout by tech bloggers - to participate in an exciting competition to create an entirely new online music application.
Martin Stiksel, Last.fm co-founder, said: “Over the course of this year we’ve seen an amazing number of applications built using our free web services.
More and more people are engaging with Last.fm through these third-party applications which have helped us grow our user-base and expand the Last.fm experience.
It’s a fantastic way to build growth, and one that we’ve encouraged since we made our API open to developers when we first started in 2002.
Our “Hack Day” is a great way to inspire even more developers to take our data and build bigger and better applications, and inspire us to take Last.fm to the next level.”
Available since the site’s inception in 2002, Last.fm’s open source web services have been utilized by third party developers to create a host of music applications that are showcased at Build.Last.fm, for anyone to use and extend the Last.fm experience beyond the site.
One such application that proved to be popular, a mash-up titled “LastTube”, utilizes listener data from Last.fm to recommend YouTube video clips based on users music taste (Build.Last.fm: LastTube).
Thanks to the open source API, Last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ functionality - which tracks songs listened to on your computer, creates a music profile and recommends new music based on your taste - has been integrated by third party developers into a number of online music sites, from Hype Machine to Blip.fm to Songbird.
In addition to web developers, advertisers and sponsors have reaped the benefits of Last.fm’s extensive community of third party developers as Last.fm offers advertisers groundbreaking and unique custom campaigns based on applications submitted to Build.Last.fm.
For example, one advertiser recently launched a campaign based on the “LastGraph” application (Build.Last.fm: LastGraph), developed by a third party programmer using Last.fm’s web services.
Last.fm’s “Hack Day” will take place on Sunday, December 14th. For more information and details of how to register, go to http://www.last.fm/group/Hack+Day.
Have you read these related articles?
Newsletter:
