At the Bandwidth Conference
Today I spent the afternoon at the Bandwidth conference in San Francisco. I met quite a few people in the very interesting intersection of music and technology. One cool company that I learned about was JamBase.com, a site for finding Live Music. I met Julie, Andy, and David from JamBase where they told me about their site running ASP.Net and its new REST API where its possible to search for live music by location or band. I immediately thought of what could be done with Silverlight and even Popfly and when I got home, I decided to look at the API.
In about 45 minutes, I created a Popfly block that used the API to perform searches. You can look at the block here. Its definition is simple, the API takes three parameters and returns a list of venues. The JavaScript code in the block formats a URL, makes and XML request to the URL and then parses the response returning an array of Venue objects. These Venue objects are then fed into the other blocks in the Popfly mashup. Once the JamBase block was complete - it was pretty simple to mash it up with other blocks.
I mashed the JamBase block up with Yahoo! Images (to get pictures of each venue) and the GeoNames service to get latitude and longitude coordinates of the venue's zip code. I used TextHelpers to create description text and then put the output into a Virtual Earth map. Doing so I was able to map out all of upcoming concert venues for Ice Cube's US Tour. Take a look
Here's what you can do with it:
- Take a look at the mashup here and tweak it to change some of the values in the mashup - make it yours.
- Use the JamBase block in your own mashup.
Whatever you do, send developers@jambase.com and me a message showing what cool mashups you come up with.