The API Strategy & Practice Conference made its successful sold out debut last week in New York with an army of enthusiastic API technologists, strategists, and technology providers in attendance. The 2-day conference kicked off on Thursday, February 21st featuring a range of keynotes, panels, and tracks that included Music, Social, API Design, Media, Retail, API Automation, Travel, Payments, and more.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of participating in CampInteractive's first ever hackathon at General Assembly. Reddit's Alexis Ohanlian hosted the hackathon (dubbed HackInteractive), a fundrasier for the non-profit organization that empowers inner-city youth through the creative power of technology. 

On Saturday, February 16th, students spent the day at General Assembly presenting their problem-solving ideas and mingling with developers. I had some great conversations with the youngsters about their plans for college, career aspirations, and passion for technology. It was truly inspiring!

By the conclusion of the event on Sunday there were 8 projects submitted to address those problems outlined by the student presentations. Clever Text won big at the event by addressing the obstacle faced by English as a second language, along with Class Cartography. Colloquial managed to integrate nearly all APIs (including our Brilliant Series and Longman Dictionary), most notably with the bitly trend map. Check out the live application here. 

HackInteractive was a really great event with an even better message and overall goal, I look forward to participating again in the future. Hats off to Mike Denton and the team over at CampInteractive for changing the world by inspiring our youth. Check out more pictures from the presentations here.  

As you may know by now, we've been a long supporter of the NYEdTech group's monthly Meetup. Adam, Tom, and Sharon have been doing a stellar job organizing topics, but next week's event is of particular interest to us as it is focused on APIs!

I will be presenting Pearson's API program alongside Jason Hoekstra of inBloom (whom I met over the weekend at HackInteractive), Megan Bowe of Tin Can API, Steve Kann of Blackboard, and Ryan Prichard of Knewton. I'm very excited to share information about our APIs to a new audience and learn about the other great offerings on the panel.

RSVPs are open now but act quick before you miss the boat! 

Last fall Pearson held its very first company-wide hackathon. The two day global event saw hundreds of Pearson employees collaborating side-by-side and remotely, with its main locations  headquartered in New York City, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, San Francisco, London, Beijing, Delhi, and more! 

To be considered for local and overall prizes, participants were encouraged to use company API content that included (but not limited to) Penguin, eCollege, DK, Financial Times, in addition to few that weren't quite ready to go live. We documented all of the fun from the London and New York locations, check out the videos below. This was the first of many that we plan to hold semi-annually, stay tuned!

[WATCH] #PsnHack: tales from London

[WATCH] #PsnHack: tales from New York

I recently had the opportunity to speak in depth with Neil Perkin, the editor of Only Dead Fish, where we discussed the publishing industry and Pearson's move to create an API program. Neil is exploring the evolving publishing industry and how these publishers are respondoing to new market demand. He is specifically interested in innovative ways publishers are making their content accessible to third parties. Check out Neil's blog post from the interview here.

Neil has captured the highlights of the interview in the blog post. Several of the applications created, Maptouria and AngelCook, are featured displaying the creative use of our DK Eyewitness Travel Guide API and the Pearson Kitchen Manager API.

This past weekend Pearson APIs attended the 4th AngelHack at the Ebay / PayPal headquarters in San jose, California. The event comprised an enthusiastic batch of 500+ participants who are now very familiar with the drill. 

UPDATE: The event has been postponed until January 5, 2013 due to the storm in New York. Give a helping hand to those affected here. 

This Saturday, November 3rd I'll be presenting and participating in the annual Foursquare Hackaton in New York. The focus of this year's global hackathon is around the new developer in-app platform Connected Apps.

I'm looking forward to seeing how developers can utilize Pearson's 8 APIs to create new applications within Foursquare. RSVP now at Hacker League or Meetup and get a head start on our APIshere. The full scheule can be seen here. 

GetElastic recently wrote an article on Pearson Plug & Play, using our developer program as an example of innovation in digital content. The writer Linda Bustos states that the “Plug and Play developer program uses APIs to make thousands of pieces of content assets acquired over decades available for remixing into new, creative, and interactive products and experiences.”

Read the full article on the GetElastic blog.