Competing to create 'mash-up' apps

We sent our resident coder Peter to Alexandra Palace in North London - on the longest day of the year - for an event which brought together hundreds of wannabe hackers: Mashed.

The term "mash-up" means combining two applications to make something different.

They were conceived in the second wave of dotcom fervour out on the west coast of the US, but they have worked their way firmly across the Atlantic.

After joining a team, he had just 24 hours to create a beautiful new blend from two existing applications.

Watch Peter Price creating his mash-up

Among all the weird and wonderful ideas presented at Mashed, these ones caught Pete's eye.
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TWITTER ON TV

• An award winning entry called "Twitter on TV" mashed together a live feed from social networking site Twitter with the interactive TV stream of Freeview (digital terrestrial television). Viewers can monitor an ever changing feed of "tweets" whilst watching TV.

MAKING BBC AUDIO ACCESSIBLE FOR BLIND USERS

• The Scripting Enabled team found a way of making the BBC's audio archive accessible to blind users. It takes the metadata from old radio programmes and reformats the information, making it friendly for screen readers.

CARBON GOGGLES

• Linden Labs employee Jim Burbrick and his team mashed together a head-up display in the online world Second Life with the AMEE carbon database to create "carbon goggles".

  Objects displayed in the virtual world became surrounded by clouds of pollution based on their average energy consumption in the real world with the aim to raise awareness of gas-guzzling items.

ENERGY SAVING AND SOCIAL GAMING

• On a similar environmental theme, "Current Cost Live" mashed together real-time data from a home electricity meter with social gaming. Home owners become participants in a competition to use less energy than their neighbours, with live data displayed on a website.

REAL-TIME VIDEO TRANSLATION

• Peter joined with self-employed programmer Jon Knox to create "Northenders" which dubbed foreign voices onto TV programme. They won two awards at the event. Jon is now planning to develop a more stable version of the system.