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 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 !

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 source soft in your favorite language that already implement it. Even your browser can act as a client: that’s handy!

Moodstocks API relies on Digest Auth, and we’re really happy about it. Go for it, you will be too!

• 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.

Isn’t it great ?

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.

To get an insight, just take a look at this insane list :

• June 2009 : Amazon acquires SnapTell
• April 2010 : Google buys Plink
• June 2010 : Ebay acquires Occipital, the guys behind the mobile barcode scanning app RedLaser
• August 2010 : Google buys Riya, the guys behind the visual shopping engine Like.com

Visual search is hot, indeed !

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 !

Of course a lot of cool add-ons are available, like social links and web forms. If you’re really crazy, they even have an API !

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 !

It’s a fantastic collaborative development platform created by Ruby on Rails gurus. It leverages Git, a magnificient version control software created by Linus Torvalds, the guy behind the Linux Operating System.

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!

As we want to be trendy too we’ve decided to use GitHub as well. Come play with our software !

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 !