Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Announcing the Winners of our March CloudSpokes Contests

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Last month, we launched three challenges on CloudSpokes to give developers ideas on how to build some useful tools that work with Box. As usual, we saw some great entries, which we’d like to share with you:

Factual + Box

If you haven’t heard of Factual, take a second to check out their site. The problem they’re tackling is a huge one – making the world’s data easily accessible for machines and developers. With millions of records covering topics that range from Starbucks’ nutritional information to locations of healthcare providers throughout the US, they’re creating one place from which your application get get whatever data sets it needs.

We wanted to combine the power of Factual’s API with Box’s content management, so we challenged the CloudSpokes community to build an app that connects Factual’s database of locations to files on Box.

Huge congrats go to Ahmedbhaila, our winner. He took an entirely mobile approach, creating a web app for administration and an APK for the end user. The web app allows administrators to pick a file from their Box account, and associate it with a location from Factual’s API. When a user arrives at that place, the Android application on their phone notifies them that the file is available and allows them to download it.

We’re working to make this app available to the public soon. The potential uses are many – retail businesses offering promotions when users are nearby or conferences giving attendees agendas when they arrive, for example. Stay tuned for updates!

PDF Bookmarklet for Box

This one is simple – if you’re on a web page, we want you to be able to click on a link in your bookmarks bar and have a PDF of that page sent into Box. Jaipandya did a brilliant job of building this, and you can get started using it right away.

Just go to https://boxmarklet.herokuapp.com, drag the icon at the top into your bookmarks bar, and click on it. The first time you do, you’ll need to authenticate with Box, but after that all you need to do is click it when you want to save a page.

Box Plugin for Notepad++

The genesis of this idea is pretty straightfoward – I use Notepad++ (if you need a basic text editor I highly recommend it), and I wanted a plugin to save and load files to and from Box. Luckily, my job affords me the ability to have this built, which Makif did brilliantly.

You can watch a demo video and download the plugin at http://nppbox.mehmetakifcakar.com/.

Thanks to CloudSpokes, Factual, and all of the developers who participated. Keep checking back here and on CloudSpokes – more contests to come soon!

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  • Ahmed Bhaila

    Thank you for the opportunity, this was a lot of fun mashing up Box and Factual APIs

  • Jay

    I like the boxmarklet – however it seems to save just the page without saving the URL of the page. I can see many instances where the URL would be useful if not necessary. Also not sure if there is a way to save just the content rather than the entire web page along with the ads.