Each of the companies is explaining what you can do with their APIs.

First presenter is from Foursquare.

I'm using my MacBook to do this with the screen turned way down. I'm not plugged into power, so we'll see how long my battery charge lasts.

The Foursquare guy clearly did not rehearse his demo. (It started off badly but got better as he went through it.)

Here's a Flickr set with some pictures.

Next company is Flatworld Knowledge. They publish textbooks and give them away online and you can pay $30 to get a printed copy. All books are licensed under Creative Commons. 17 books in their catalog. They just got $6 million second round funding. No API. They brought all the XML for their content.

drop.io is next. I'm listening to the presentation but I don't know what this app does. Seems like it's a free version of Amazon S3, but they say they use S3. I don't get it. (I used to understand it, but that was a long time ago, and I think it's changed.)

Now there are some people from the NY Times. "We have a newspaper and a website, check it out." Hehe. Derek Gottfried is doing the presentation being very humorous. Someone is "no longer with us." How did he die? He moved on.

Snooth is a wine database. It has an API at api.snooth.com.

VoteReports is up. "Rational Ignorance." Politician report cards.

learnbat is an online tutoring platform.

Hunch. Ben says we're awesome. He's really excited. He's awesome too. They do recommendations. Like Netflix or Amazon but for everything. They have a cool Twitter predictor app.

Knewton.

http://try.mongodb.org/

 4/2/2010; 4:33:25 PM.   .

I think Gruber is wrong and Doctorow is right.

Apple is eating our seed corn. That's why you should buy one Eee PC for every iPad you buy. Buy something that you can pervert in any way you want. Something you can plug anything into. Buy something you can copy all your data out of. If you must have an iPad, then buy (and use) something open to balance things out. Buy a Mac if you like. Or something that runs Linux. It doesn't have to be open source. It just has to be an open box.

If we don't have open boxes lying around we'll wake up 20 years from now and wonder why there are no more hippie programmers, like Woz. Sheez, like Jobs was when he was a kid.

We also need some VCs to compete with Twitter and FourSquare. There are more ideas out there than Fred and Bijan can finance. We need more user-VCs.

Gotta run to the NYC Hackathon now. I'll expand on this some more later if there's interest.

Update: Pictures from the Hackathon start here.

 4/2/2010; 3:36:08 PM.   .

In the background of all the hype about the iPad is the question about the future of Amazon's Kindle. But I wonder how much Amazon really cares about it.

A few thoughts.

1. I own a Kindle, but I have no idea where it is. I've read a few books on it, marveled at my ability to carry a small library with me as I traveled, and then reverted to carrying a book. But I expect at some point someone will make a device that works better and I will stop carrying physical books. Maybe. But I still go to the movies, even though I can watch movies on my netbook. Who knows. Regardless, sorry, but I don't like the Kindle enough to travel with it.

2. Isn't Amazon making their money selling books? The Kindle sure looks like a loss-leader to me.

3. Doesn't Amazon's software run on the iPhone? Doesn't it seem likely that they will port it to the iPad? I don't doubt that Amazon would choose to not sacrifice their healthy business selling books to protect their healthy business selling hardware, but what about Apple? Given that Apple has rejected podcatchers because they conflict with functionality built into the iPhone -- maybe Apple won't be so open-minded about Amazon porting their software to iPad? Maybe they want to be the exclusive distributor of books for the iPad?

4. Amazon is a funny company too -- their EC2 and S3 businesses must generate a lot of money and don't seem to have anything with being a store. So maybe Amazon has a reason to want to be in the Kindle business? With Amazon there's always a bit of mystery as to why they're doing what they do.

It's just not as simple as some of the analysts seem to think.

But I wouldn't bet against Amazon coming up with a new Kindle that's competitive with Apple's iPad. And I wouldn't bet against Apple being a major bottleneck and trying to keep competitors like Amazon off their platform.

PS: I continue to hold Apple stock, the only tech company I am currently invested in. As I hope you can see, it does not in any way color my analysis. Probably should buy some Amazon too. I think both companies are great investments, even if I don't always like what they do to the ecosystem. ">

Update: See PC World's comparison of books on iPad vs Kindle.

 4/2/2010; 6:08:58 AM.   .