Two weekends ago, a group of developers and designers gathered at the Adobe offices in downtown San Francisco to work on data visualization projects taking open data sets and fusing them in creative ways to yield new insights. swissnex San Francisco and Creative Commons organized the event and datasets were provided by Infochimps and Factual and judges were brought in from some of the top design firms and startups in SF and Europe, such as Stamen, LUST, Color, and Square. About a hundred developers and designers showed up for the event, and 20 teams competed in the event. Given such strong competition and high standards, I was really thrilled when my team was chosen as the best data mashup! Here’s what we did… (more…)

This weekend saw dozens of hackers converge on the Mendeley offices in New York and London for a weekend of fun, games, and changing how research is done. Hack4Knowledge arose from internal Mendeley hackdays, where our developers are released from the tyranny of Trac tickets and given free rein to build whatever crazy idea comes to mind. Some of our best ideas have come out of these events, so it only made sense to open our doors and invite in the broader developer community. On Saturday the 11th, the offices in London and New York were opened; food, beer, and entertainment were secured; and a few dozen hackers sat down for a weekend of code and camaraderie. There were 10 teams that presented their work at the end of the weekend. Some of the projects are live and linked so you can check them out, for the others I’ve included screenshots or links to the code repository.
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Photo by Rui Pereira

Do you dream of creating the Blippy for BriteKite, or the Gowalla for GetGlue? No? Well, maybe you’re thinking beyond better ways to sell stuff to people and wanting to try something a little bigger. You wouldn’t be alone. Universities, governmental bodies, and companies have increasingly begun to make their data available to the public and they want it to be used! All we need now is for smart developers to realize there’s as much money and considerably more fame to be had in helping people find the next cure for cancer or spotting public health issues than in spotting buy-one-get-one deals at the local store. Please join us on June 11th and 12th for Hack4Knowledge. (more…)

Photo by Rémi Menegon

As the summer arrives, you may be thinking about taking some time off, maybe going to the beach to do something about that unhealthy pallor you acquired poring over the literature this past semester. Forget all that. Go buy some Vitamin D and come back inside, because I know exactly how you should spend the summer months. Geeking out with the Mendeley research data, that’s how! Mendeley has data on 85M research papers including who’s writing about what, who’s reading them, and where they’re being published. We want to give you $10001 for doing something really cool with all that data. The big announcement was back in March, applications have been rolling in, and now Amazon has chipped in free AWS credits for everyone taking part, with a big pot of credits for the winner.
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Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API (now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with. My analysis focused on our second largest discipline, Computer Science. Biological Sciences (my discipline) is the largest, but I started with this one so that I could look at the data with fresh eyes, and also because it’s got some really cool papers to talk about. Here’s what I found: (more…)