Last.fm Asks UK “Hackers” To Help Extend Reach

Contest Offers  £1000 Prize

Last.fm will host “Hack Day” on December 14th at Corbet Place Bar, East London.  At the event which is hosted in partnership with CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site, developers will be invited to utilize Last.fm’s free open source web services in a one-day competition to build a new Last.fm application.  The winning developer will receive a grand prize of £1000, with additional prizes for the competition’s runners-up including Xbox 360s.

Available since the site’s inception in 2002, Last.fm’s web services, which developers can use to extend the Last.fm experience beyond the site, have been utilized by third parties to create a host of music applications showcased at Build.Last.fm. One popular application, a mash-up titled “LastTube”, utilizes listener data from Last.fm to recommend YouTube video clips.

Thanks to the open API, Last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ functionality – which tracks songs listened to on your computer, creates a music profile and recommends new music based on your taste – has been integrated by third party developers into a number of online music sites, from Hype Machine to Blip.fm to Songbird.

Martin Stiksel, Last.fm co-founder, said: “Over the course of this year we’ve seen an amazing number of applications built using our free web services. More and more people are engaging with Last.fm through these third-party applications which have helped us grow our user-base and expand the Last.fm experience. It’s a fantastic way to build growth, and one that we’ve encouraged since we made our API open to developers when we first started in 2002. Our “Hack Day” is a great way to inspire even more developers to take our data and build bigger and better applications, and inspire us to take Last.fm to the next level.”