FOR FULL RESULTS OF THE AUTUMN 2011 CONTEST SEE

API Mashup Contest of Germany attracts 70 projects, Google APIs are the most used ones Social shopping, smart hotel finder and Google+ Counter are the top three API Mashups in the autumn round 2011 of the contest.

The autumn 2011 round of the API Mashup Contest attracted some 70 projects, mainly from Europe. Each judge selected his top 10 projects. Ten points for every number one position, one point for the position 10. The top 5 positions are:

1. Suitts Me, 53 points

SuittsMe is a social shopping network, that allows users to share and discuss clothes they want to buy. "In real life we don't go shopping alone, but we go with friends because we want their advice and opinions," say the founders Andrew Fan and Gleb Pitsevich, who run a team of young developers from Belarus.

2. Hotel Maps, 44 points

Hotelmaps.com is a hotel finder built around maps. For each hotel, an icon with the room rate and hotel star rating is displayed on a map. Room rates and star ratings are permanently visible on the map, allowing the user to see the most relevant information at a glance: location, price and rating. This sets HotelMaps.com apart from other map based hotel finders, which usually use dots or markers on the map, without immediately visible pricing information. Right from the start, more than 200,000 hotels worldwide can be found. The founders Michael and Andreas Bogen have years of experience in developing vertical search engines in Germany.

3. Google+ Counter, 39 points

Google+ Counter is one of the first services leveraging the new Google social network, Google+. It has helped thousands of users to find interesting people on Google+ in its first weeks of operation. Since the introduction of the Google+ API it has been visited by more than 50,000 users per day. The founder Ralf Rottmann is an experienced German entrepreneur making an effort to fully utilise all the latest Web technologies.

4. Interviewr, 38 points

The interviewr.com makes scheduling and conducting interviews easy. Roger Stringer, the founder has 12 years experience in software development and 10 years involved in startups in Canada.

5. Helioid, 26 points

Using Helioid search refinement tools you can find and explore what you are looking for by interactively narrowing your search results. It’s mashing up results from several engines to put together a solid search experience for users. Helioid is a visual search and aggregation tool that enables exploration of information by dynamically categorizing a large number of search results based on their content.

"The competition was tough this time – some 20 projects appeared frequently in Jury members’ top 10s," says Contest founder Pavel Curda. The next step is to help the projects get what they need – mentoring, business advice, help with getting additional team members, seed finance – to maximise the projects' chances of turning into successful and viable start-ups. This help also includes tens of mentoring sessions from the judges - mostly top league Germany-based angel investors. Several European business accelerators/incubators have expressed an interest in hosting projects viable for investment.

The people behind the registered projects by and large are very committed – roughly one quarter of them are already involved full-time, one half part-time (more than 10 hours a week) and one quarter spend less than 10 hours a week working on their projects. Two thirds of the projects seek mentoring advice, 70% of the projects seek people to join their teams – they are interested mainly in marketers, developers and graphic designers.

Google, Facebook and Twitter APIs were the most popular. The high number of registered projects and good quality of them was surprising to everyone. The most frequently used APIs in registered mashups included Google Maps (19), followed by Facebook Graph API (15), Twitter and YouTube (each used 14 times). A Google API was used by two thirds of the registered mashups.