• Tusiyu
• Meipi
• Tubegraph
• other stuff

iWeekend has meant a lot for us during this 2009, as we had the chance to attend three of them, and each of those in a different manner. It all began of course in January with the creation of Tusiyu; we had such a good experience there that we decided it was an experience worth repeating, so we attended the next one at Valencia in June, where Rifalia was born. In November, 10 iWeekends were run in parallel, and we helped organize the one at Madrid, in the one where Emprendemas was created.

All in all, we could live the iWeekend experience in three different ways (with our idea selected, contributing for a different one, and also from the organization point of view) and we feel lucky for those, and of course, for the people we have met.

We have not forgotten other code events; for example we were able to attend a Yahoo! Developer Network evening in Barcelona and then another one in Madrid. Regarding older projects, with so many things going on, we didn’t have much time to keep being involved in the developments such as for Google Gadgets, as we had previously been.

Let’s see how things keep going during 2010. (Yes, we know we’re already in March and still covering last year;-) Even though we’re trying to focus (at least a bit;-), we’re always open for new ideas and experiments, so who knows!

• Tusiyu
• Meipi
• Tubegraph
• other stuff

Tubegraph

We created Tubegraph as an experiment for dynamically rating videos at the end of 2008, following a contest in a Google Pizza Night event. The beginning of 2009 was very promising for this project, as we were featured in several websites and we even had a special mention in Beca Alzado amongst 176 contestants. :-)

The truth is that later on we didn’t pay all the attention we would have liked to this project, due to the ongoing ones in parallel, despite of having some (interesting, we think;-) ideas on how the experiment should evolve, trying to promote the ratings via games with a purpose or crowdsourcing them via Mechanical Turk or similar.

The good news is that we might have found (or they might have found us!;-) the right partners to make this experiment evolve and be more useful. Stay tuned for news in this respect, which should come up in the first half of the year.

The project has a blog, even though we don’t update it so often. Check out the “tubegraphs of the month“, and analysis such as this basketball one over the generated graphs (example below) that show which are the most interesting parts of each video.

• Tusiyu
• Meipi
• Tubegraph (coming soon)
• other stuff  (coming soon)

Meipi is the collaborative mapping project we’ve been working at with four other meipis (Dome aka @urbanohumano, Alfonso, Pablo and Francesco aka @immaginoteca) since 2007. The purpose of the tool is permit users create collaborative maps where other people can participate. To this day, 350 meipis have already been created, where more than 1800 users have collaborated.

The most interesting news for us last year was that in July we attended the I Encuentro Internacional de Cartografía Ciudadana in Gijón, where we were so happy to see that it’s been successfully used in many different ways within very interesting cartography projects. It was a great week indeed and we got in touch with plenty of “cartography people”, not only from all over Spain but from abroad as well.

The Gijón meeting was the perfect place for announcing some important news, as we open sourced the code of the project. Though it was very well received by our colleagues there, we know there is still a lot of work ahead to get people more involved. Of course, don’t hesitate to contact us, should you have any idea/feedback/etc or feel like participating. Translations are also welcome! ;-) (Right now meipi.org works in six languages, including Galician.)

Thanks in part to the new plugin system we have been able to include extra functionality in several meipis, such as having other base cartography like OpenStreetMap (for example in the 6000km project), and we look forward to introducing new features during this year.

You can check the list of meipis already available or create a new one online or downloading the code. It is also possible to follow us in the blog and twitter. Lastly, if you’re brave enough, check the (looong;-) video below with our participation at Gijón.

• Tusiyu
• Meipi (coming soon)
• Tubegraph (coming soon)
• other stuff (coming soon)

TUSIYU

The story of Tusiyu began last January, when we attended the first edition of iWeekend in Madrid (a sort of “Startup Weekend” where 50 people choose an idea and develop it together) and we were lucky enough to get ours selected: A simple agreement tool for a group of friends to choose when and where, which ended up being Tusiyu.

After the productive weekend and some time to refine the most important bugs, the tool was fully usable, and indeed used for different purposes (not only to organize dinners, but also trips, etc.) and little by little, thanks to the feedback of people, by an increased number of users.

In order to be able to keep growing and adding features (some of them are already taking place, like comments, edition or subscription), linking the tool with other systems (like table-reservation ones), etc., Alex joined the team in November. We have just reworked the design, and look forward to keep improving the project!

You can check the blog if you’re interested in Tusiyu and follow it via rss, in twitter, or facebook. We’re also participating at BBVA Open Talent contest, and your votes would be helpful indeed. ;-)

En cualquier caso, para aquéllos que prefieran recibir por correo las entradas de este blog (a nuestra madre, por ejemplo, no la hemos convencido aún de las citadas feed-bondades), hemos habilitado esa posibilidad. Simplemente hay que introducir el mail en ahí a la derecha donde pone “Subscribe” (si no nos estás leyendo en el feed, claro;-)

Así nuestros dos lectores podrán recibir las actualizaciones del Lamboratory cómodamente. :-)

Al igual que los otros participantes, los meipis presentaremos las características de nuestro proyecto, y los ya numerosos usos interesantes que tanto nosotros mismos como otros colectivos le hemos ido dando a la herramienta.

Además, aprovecharemos este encuentro para liberar por fin el código de meipi, algo que para nosotros es muy ilusionante. Pese al trabajo de las últimas semanas por limpiar un poco el código, somos conscientes de las limitaciones del estado actual y del largo camino que queda por recorrer. Pero en cualquier caso, el paso más importante ya está dado y esta ocasión es dese luego propicia para tener un buen feedback de primera mano. :-)

Así que ya sabéis, si tenéis ganas de crear un meipi, ahora hay una alternativa a hacerlo en meipi.org: Simplemente hay que descargar el código e instalarlo en un servidor.

Y si sois valientes como para hacer modificaciones o crear un plugin, no dejéis de hacérnoslo saber! :-D