Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App - Apple iPad Winners
The first thing we'd like to do is thank everybody who got in touch about this competition. We had a lot of people enquire but we probably cut the entry date a bit short and we ended up with four entries. This isn't necessarily a bad thing since we could spend more time analysing the entries we had. We've ended up with some great examples including a HTML5 mashup app by Aaron Basset, a Silverlight app by Gergely Orosz, a real-time stat app that kept things simple to target mobile browsers by Gerry Mulvenna and Bing maps app by David H. Bello.
Our brief for the competition was pretty simple:
We want you to build a web application using either the Kwwika JavaScript or Kwwika Silverlight API (or both?). Your application will subscribe to real-time data from Kwwika and use it to show what is happening NOW in the South African 2010 World Cup.
We will make all tweets containing #worldcup available to each developer as soon as the tweet is made (yeah, in real-time) via the Twitter Streaming API. We will also make the World Cup 2010 fixtures and live team statistics available to each developer thanks to Opta!
Before we announce the decision (but you can clearly just scroll down if you like) I'd like to spend some time going over how our decision was made by analysing each entry. We'll do this in order of entry submission.
Aaron described his competition entry as:
Kwwika, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and awesomeness! This mega-mash brings together over a dozen different APIs to give you the best realtime data from every country in the World Cup. Never miss a single tweet, picture or video. Goooooaaaaaaaal!!
Aaron has clearly put a lot of effort into this competition. His entry uses both the Kwwika real-time World Cup twitter data and the real-time Opta data (just for the fixtures) retrieved using the Kwwika JavaScript API, geolocation using the YQL Geo Library, tweet text translation using the Google AJAX Language API, teams percentage chances of winning stats via Norwegian computing center and 2 Sporten, highlights via TwitPic, replays (or relevant YouTube clips) via the YouTube API, tweet geolocation displayed using the Google Maps API ... the list goes on. If you want even more information then read Aaron's blog post "A colophon of a World Cup entry".
Not only has Aaron created one app, he's just thrown together a second app focusing more on the Opta stats. You can see this application which uses some Opta Replay data that we are publishing through Kwwika here
http://replay.worldcup.aaronbassett.com/ and read a short write-up about this new application here: http://aaronbassett.tumblr.com/post/797785931/wondering-how-hard-the-kwwika-api-is-to-work-with
So, what do we think of Aaron's application? Well, it rocks! We wanted a mashup and what Aaron delivered is quite possibly one of the biggest mashes we've seen. The use of all the different APIs is fantastic and clearly shows the power of web applications and the enhancements that HTML5 will bring. We'd have liked to have seen more information related to the next or live game and a way of getting the users involved in using the application and maybe collaborating would have been a great enhancement. This is really important to keep users on the page but we were a little delayed in making the Opta data available so that may be partly our fault.
All in all Aaron's World Cup Mash is a fantastic application and it's also got loads of potential to be developed further. Aaron will be opening up his source and we'll update this blog post with the details when we have them.
Gergely described his competition entry as:
Tweet For Your Team monitors the intensity and mood of tweets before, during and after a worldcup game as well as showing the score during the game - all in real time. It's a fun way of visualizing how spectators around the world engage in the World Cup using Twitter to support their team.
Gergely works mainly with .NET and Silverlight so it's no surprise that he chose to develop his real-time push app in Silverlight using the Kwwika Silverlight API. Gergely describe Tweet for your Team as "a fun tool to monitor the intensity and mood of supporters' tweets during a World Cup 2010 game", and it certainly is fun. The latest updates to the application include a background Vuvuzela noise (which you can turn off) and the ability to "Cheer" for your team. This cheering option is a fantastic idea and something that add some user input into the application with each cheer being instantly published to everybody using the application. The Tweet Intensity monitor is really interesting to watch before and during the game. If a team scores a goal the mood of the scoring team swings into the green whilst the mood of the conceding team fans swings into the red. This makes the application really engaging. Tweet for your Team also allows you to set the rate of twitter updates which mean you really can read the tweets if you set it to "slow" speed. Finally the performance of the application is really impressive considering tweet rates for Spain alone have been seen to hit 3500 tweets per minute.
You can read more about the Tweet for your Team on Gergely's blog post "World Cup 2010 Real Time Twitter Mashup". He's also recently publish a post on "Streaming World Cup Tweets in Silverlight with a few lines of code" (using Kwwika).
We don't want to get into a technology discussion since we support most technologies but we clearly need to mention that the fact the application is in Silverlight means that it restricts some users from accessing it.
Technologies aside, Gergely has delivered a really engaging application that has so much potential in being applied to all sort of other live events.
Gerry described his competition entry as:
A Kwwika website aimed primarily for mobile users offering live match data on the current match
Gerry created a game to allow people to predict World Cup results. He the decided to enter the Kwwika World Cup competition with a different application which is a very simple page that shows statistics and tweets related to the live game. He's also added also added a link that lets you see the Opta stats replayed in the page. At the time of writing the tweets and twitter cloud functionality only work in Firefox. The idea is simple and effective. I can certainly see the benefit of being able to view the live statistics of a game whilst watching it on the television. Some improvements that could easily be made are visualisations about the statistics along with better cross browser compatibility - all easily fixed.
David described his competition entry as:
A mashup between Google & Bing maps and Kwwika, which let you watch in a maps tweets in real-time.
David's entry relied on tweets coming through with geolocation information. When we originally wrote the application that receives the tweets from the Twitter Streaming API we didn't push through this information. Following a few requests we added this but in doing so we noticed that most tweets didn't contain this information. However, David's application does show that when a tweet comes through with the necessary information it's possible to easily update the Bing map to navigate to that location. We've noticed that the application seems to jump between tweets quite quickly and even goes back to older tweets.
And the Winners are...
From the title of the blog post you'll probably have seen we used "Winners". The World Cup final can't end in our draw but the Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App competition has. That's because we just couldn't choose between two of the entries.
So, well done to Aaron Bassett and Gergely Orosz who will both receive an Apple Wi-Fi iPad 32GB. We'll be in touch to sort this out.
Aaron's mashup application blew us away with how it took the real-time Kwwika data from Twitter and Opta and integrated it in an application with all the other APIs. Gergely created a really engaging application that you could easily sit and watch and interact with during any live World Cup match.
So, a BIG thanks from Kwwika and TellyLinks.com to all the entrants and the winners and pleased be sure to have a look at Aaron's World Cup Mash and Gergely's Tweet for your Team real-time push Kwwika powered applications during the World Cup 2010 final in 30 minutes (19:30) UK time.
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