Mashed 08: T + 1 Week

There were a number of great projects at Mashed that I wanted to blog about. Unfortunately, by the time I’d got round to setting up a blog I somewhat missed the boat. So, instead I’m going to revisit some of my favourite Mashed projects and see where they are 1 week on. Carbon Goggles has gone live and grown an annotation interface in the last week. Hopefully some of the other projects have also survived the journey home and gone on to greater things.

Team Bob was undoubtedly my favourite of the many BBC/subtitles/video/web mashups. A great visual gag rather than a useful service, I’m not sure this will go live, but there is now a video on line that serves to show this technically impressive and very amusing hack.

CurrentCost Live was the winner of the social responsibility prize at Mashed (somehow beating Carbon Goggles!) and was a great project. Starting with a CurrentCost meter Dale from IBM and team published electricity usage data online, comparing and analysing it to award XBox Live style achievements and trophies for saving energy. It doesn’t look like the project is live at the moment, which is a shame as I have a slug. It would be great to hook it all up and pwn people by turning my lights off while saving the planet.

The project that struck me as the most useful was Opening Times, a service that takes your postcode and tells you the opening times for all your local shops. I was really hoping it would go live as a service as I could see myself using it all the time. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried: not only is Opening Times live and kicking, it looks like it has been since April…

Mashed gives you a straight 24 hours to kick off a project and break the back of it with a team of great people, but it’s great when the development doesn’t stop when the beanbags leave the building. Hopefully some of the projects that started in a crazy whirlwind of hacking, mashing and rocking will continue to blossom over the coming weeks.