It’s a really convenient tool for anybody who wants to integrate visual search as a service in their app through our API. It enables you to speak live with Moodstocks’ techies. We will be very happy to help you get yourself up and running !
Are you wondering how we did that ? Well, we simply use 37signals’ Campfire. It’s a really cool chat developed with Ruby On Rails (God, we love that framework). And it’s for free. Try it for yourself !
As you guys know we have been using the very famous Github for a few weeks now. And honestly : the more we play with it, the more we love it. We discover really neat features everyday !
As an example, just consider the wiki. Did you know that it handles a lot of widespread doc formats, such as AsciiDoc ? It enables us to reuse what we have been writing so far with our favorite software. Plus we get the nice styling and the versioning for free !
Want to see the result ? Feel free to get through our brand new Moodstocks API documentation and let us know what you think. We want to provide our customers with the best support !
When it comes to releasing a commercial API, authentication is key. On the one hand your users will want to feel secure, as they are paying. On the other hand you’ll wish to find a lightweight solution, because you are developing and maintaining! Plus you want it to be as easy as possible for third-party developers to write a client – and we all know that’s quite boring to implement another custom signing process!…
In such a context, we at Moodstocks like to look for open standards with robust specifications and wide adoption. And luckily, we found one. It’s called Digest Auth, and it’s cool!
It provides out-of-the-box a decent security level with features such as nonce – to prevent replay attacks, and MD5 cryptography – to make sure your secret key is not sent in plaintext over the network. And both on the client and server side, you’ll find some open sourcesoft in your favorite language that already implement it. Even your browser can act as a client: that’s handy!
When it comes to marketing and communication, huge B2C companies such as L’Oréal invest a lot. As an example, just consider the launch of a new perfume. The target has to be reached, no matter what it takes :
Spots will be displayed on your TV
Billboards will spread all around your town
Ads will appear in your magazines
Mini-sites will be deployed on the Internet
Banners will invade the Web
Viral videos will create the buzz in your community
Social games will prevent you from working
iPhone apps will be released
Special events will be organized in your shops
Samples will be given out in front of your tube stations
At the end of the day, you will be adressed in all possible contexts : on / off-site, on / off-line. But you will still lack the big picture. You might get the free samples without being aware of the cool iPhone app waiting for you !
That’s where image recognition comes into play. It enables advertisers to achieve maximal brand awareness by linking all the facets of their communication plan with the help of a single device.
You’ll get the cool iPhone App as well as the fancy videos, the funny social game and the map to the closest shop simply by taking a pic of the free sample, the billboard or the magazine ad with your smartphone.
I guess all of you have heard of augmented reality. With the wide spread of clever smart phones it has become a really trendy topic these days ! You might even have already downloaded apps such as Layar, Wikitude or Bionic Eye.
At first sight augmented reality looks complicated whereas it’s actually a fairly simple concept. It just uses the view screen of your smartphone camera to overlay contextual data on real-life scenes :
So far all the apps available on the market rely on geographic information. In other words, the augmented reality experience is bound to places. Super cool to get information on restaurants or monuments, but what about say DVDs or billboards ?
Enters image recognition. It enables your smartphone to see objects. Of course the underlying technology should be robust (smartphone pics are usually of poor quality), fast (users expect near real-time experiences) and scalable (they are millions of objects out there) enough.
So you want to provide your users with a new generation augmented reality experience ? Just come partner with us ! We have everything you need to get you up and running ! And we’ll be really happy to help.
At first we decided to develop our own software with Ruby On Rails but the css part is such a mess that we started looking for alternatives.
After struggling for hours we finally found the perfect solution for us. It’s called Madmimi, and it’s great.
All you need to get started with it is a banner. Then use the fancy drag-and-drop interface to design your layout. And finally customize the style with color pickers. That’s it !
Plus their business model is just lovely. You get billed each month according to the number of contacts they store. But you can send as many newsletters as needed !
Are you looking forward to reading the cool newsletters we build with Madmimi? Then please feel free to subscribe right now !
GitHub is really sweet to manage Open Source projects. That’s why companies such as Facebook and Twitter have already joinded the community. Just like so many out there : there are so far more than 1 million code repositories on GitHub!
It enables you to integrate visual search into your apps with no effort. All you have to do is to provide us with your data sources (you’ve got a fancy web interface for that) and to call our web service. That’s it !
The business model is very handy as Moodstocks API is a pay-as-you-go service. There are no long term contracts on your part. You simply pay a monthly fee based on the number of images we index and the number of calls you make. Isn’t it cool ?
If you want some more information, feel free to contact us. We’ll be really happy to answer your questions. And if you’re already convinced don’t wait anymore : just sign up !
And we’ll keep it up-to-date, we swear ! Mainly thanks to the latest WordPress release. WordPress is now far more than a blog editing platform. It has everything you need to build a leightweight yet complete site. A perfect CMS !
We hope you’ll love the new Moodstocks site as much as we do. Comments are very welcome !
