I am excited to announce our involvement in the EDesign Lab Hackathon taking place on June 1 - 2 in New York City. The event is being organized by EDesign Lab and New Visions for Public Schools along with Developers for Good and CodeMontage at the Center for Social Innovation in Chelsea. Register now to participate in the event. 

Join the conversation by tweeting @PearsonAPI, @EDESIGNLABSORG and using #HACKK12.

I'm excited to announce that Pearson will be a sponsor and API partner for the first-ever book publishing hackathon in New York City next week. The 36 hour event will take place at Alley NYC on Saturday May 18 and Sunday May 19, and continuing onto the Book Expo America at the Javits Center on May 31st.

Register for tickets here you won't want to miss out! 

I had the pleasure of attending The Next Web's Kings of Code Hack Battle at the end of last month. 100 developers gathered together at the 'Machine Building', an old factory, to build something awesome over the next 36 hours. Developers started arriving at 9 am and began to occupy their space for the next two days. 

Part of a series of hack events spread throughout time and space (well, multiple hack events in different cities around the world), the London event was held at Bloomsberg's fabulous offices on the weekend of April 27-28. Great organization ensured that no-one was short of food, drink, power, WiFi or indeed advise for the whole weekend (I think this is the first hack I have attended where there were no network problems !!).

This past weekend, we were at the Manhattan Center in New York for TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hackathon. Pearson was one of the event partner sponsors alongside Facebook, Visa, Foursquare, and many other great companies. The hackathon kicked off on Saturday afternoon and concluded on Sunday morning at 10AM when 165 developers lined up to present 60-second pitches for their applications. (This was not done without the help of ice cream sandwiches, energy drinks, and candy). 

Nine apps were created using Pearson APIs, with the winner of our $500 prize for Best Use of Pearson APIs going to Vocal Vocab. Developers Adesina Lalude and David Idell (pictured above) created an application that paired The New York Times articles with our Longman Dictionary API to help users build an improved vocabulary. We will be featuring the application soon on the Pearson Developers blog - stay tuned. 

The winners were:  

Rambler - allows users to see debit and credit card transactions by location
Learn to Drive - a virtual driving instructor
Radical - create embeddable aestheticlaly pleasing calendars

Other stage highlights include: laser tag, live guitars with Game of Tones, a Scalable Augmented Reality hologram, a drone demo, Bar Power, an unexpected onstage hack of the event, and a developer duo who hacked everyone's applications with Backathon.

Special thanks to the nine teams who used Pearson APIs and to everyone who stopped by the Pearson table. A full list of winners from the hackathon can be seen here.

If you're a techie in New York City and are eager to escape the office for a nice stroll in the sun, I urge you to explore NY Tech Day - the world's largest startup event at the picturesque Pier 92 right now. Registration is free and still open. The event wraps at on't miss out!

TechCrunch has annouced the official event schedule and API prizes for the Disrupt Hackathon taking place this weekend. The API Workshop schedule can be seenhere, with the agenda here. I will be onhand for the weekend with my colleague Chris Schoenfeld, where we'll be offering a $500 Prize in Amazon giftcards for the best use of Pearson APIs. 

Tickets to the Disrupt Hackathon are still available here. If hanging out with us is not motivation enough to attend, teams who submit projects will be eligible for free tickets to the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference ($3,000 value)!

Join the conversation on @PearsonAPI and @hhackdisrupt. Look forward to seeing you this weekend!

Last September Gregg had the pleasure of attending TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on behalf of Pearson, and later this month I'll have the opportunity to experience it for myself in New York! The hackathon kicks off on Saturday, April 27 and concludes on Sunday, April 28 at the Manhattan Center in midtown.

More information about TechCrunch Disrupt can be found here along with ticket links. Get a head start by checking out Pearson APIs (including our brand new Dictionaries API) before the hackathon. Be sure to follow @PearsonAPI on Twitter for updates and to join in on the conversation. 

Looking forward to the event and hope to see you there! 

Today marks the official launch of Pearson's next-generation Dictionaries API, the 10th to be added to our developer platform. Since its launch in 2011, the Longman Dictionary API has been one of the most popular Pearson APIs among developers.

We've seen great applications built using the content and as a result of user feedback, the Dictionary API has been launched to include new features, additional dictionary content, and our first non-English content from The Longman English-Chinese Dictionary of 100,000 Words (2nd Ed).

The Dictionaries API is currently running in beta and features a wealth of additional content, improved search performance, enhancements that enable quicker find and return within the API, and a cleaner, greatly simplified JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structure for accessing data. 

Over the next few months more content will be added to the API, making it an even richer source for developers to enhance their applications. Start testing out the new API here, and sign up for our newsletter for more announcements. As the API is in beta form we invite you to share your feedback with us on Twitter or via email. Look forward to hearing from you. 

If you are reading this blog post it means that I have returned to New York in one piece after 2 weeks in Austin for SXSW. I'd previously attended the annual conference in 2010 for the music session only, but this time around I was active for all tracks: edu, interactive, trade, film, and music. I was joined in Austin by Diana Stepner and Gregg Alpert who each flew in from London and San Francisco (respectively) for a full calendar of educational sessions, panels, meetings,  and of course some delicious Texas BBQ.