Project Nimbus

Project Nimbus is an effort to get more data sets online and accessible for innovators to build on. With the available data sets we have, the Project Nimbus team wanted to create an application which not only uses data just from one provider but mashing up different data sets together to make handy applications. We came out with this application to help you locate us better! Enter the location you are coming from and the application will route you straight to us showing you the traffic images along the route. What’s more? When you do visit us, it gives you an overview of the restaurants around Microsoft Innovative Centre Singapore to satisfy your hunger. How was the application implemented? 1. Get an application key – Email projectnimbus@live.com.sg to get your key. 2. Add in the AccountKey & UniqueUserID into the request header. ...

Last April 21, Code::Xtreme was launched in SMU. Code::Xtreme is a 24-hour competition organized by ITSC to create awareness on the use and value of standards in programming. To find out more about CodeXtreme and how you can join, you can check out this site. This year, Microsoft Singapore is participating as a technology partner through Project Nimbus. Project Nimbus is an “information marketplace” that allows developers to access hosted Singapore data. It also allows content providers to host their data in a structured manner. To find out more about Project Nimbus and how you can start accessing public data, check out this site. We will be running technical sessions to prepare participants for the competition. To find out more about these, sign up in the Code::Xtreme link above. Hope to see you there! ...

Earlier this week, we hosted the Singapore Computer Society (SCS) Cloud Computing and Virtualization Special Interest Group (SIG) at our Microsoft offices for a talk on Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy. This event was the first of their “Cloud Computing Learning Journey into Major Cloud Providers” series of talks which they are organizing for their members. This was also one of the events which kicked-off our Microsoft Cloud Week this week. The turnout was fabulous (100+ attendees), and we all had a lot of fun sharing with the SCS folks what Microsoft is doing with the cloud. [gallery link=“file” orderby=“rand”] Here are the presentation slides from that night: [slideshare id=3743394&doc=scsopeningjohnfernandes-100416021239-phpapp01] [slideshare id=3743390&doc=scsmicrosoftcloudserviceswalterbenjamin-100416021208-phpapp02] [slideshare id=3743398&doc=scsprojectnimbusnenggiinyap-100416021239-phpapp02] [slideshare id=3743401&doc=scswindowsazureplatformjonathanwong-100416021257-phpapp02] [slideshare id=3743387&doc=scsddcdarrylchantry-100416021137-phpapp01]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/9824912[/vimeo] Created by passionate people who loves innovation, Project Nimbus is an initiative that hopes to solve innovators’ problem of finding data sets and services by offering a central place for authoritative and reliable data and services access from government and commercial entities in Singapore. From their website: http://projectnimbus.org Our goal: To unite the voices of Singapore Innovators and identify data sets and services we as Innovators want To work with content owner and government entities for the appropriate release of these data sets and services to Singapore Innovators To ultimately help innovators focus on innovation (instead of the silly stuff that burdens us all today) We have been working with the Project Nimbus guys and they have been churning out a lot of things! If you want to know how you can innovate faster and focus on creating awesome mashups be sure to check out their website! ...

I’ve been starting to explore iPhone development lately. At first I was taking my time at learning at Objective C which went fine for a while but one of the guys on the project was asking if I could help build some apps for Project Nimbus, translation: build stuff fast. We talked about MonoTouch.NET which is basically a framework that will allow you to code apps with .NET. JOY!! First a quick intro about Project Nimbus: as Chewy would put it, it’s basically a supermarket for data here in Singapore. The team is hard at work at securing data from all sorts of providers. They currently have Hungry Go Where, Land Transport Authority, National Environment Agency, and National Library Board onboard as data providers, and i know they have quite a few more coming. What this means for developers is that if they have a great idea, they don’t have to go out by themselves with these big agencies and possibly spend tons of money on acquiring the data. If you want to find out more, check out http://projectnimbus.org/about/ for more information. They also very keen on getting input from developers as to what types of data they think would be useful, as well as feedback on the project as well. If you’re interested, the about page has a link to contact them :) So back to my application. Right now, I’m figuring out how to actually get the data from the service. Looking at this entry, they actually provide a link to the data that’s returned when you make a call to the service. Check out the post, and towards the end, you’ll find a few links that shows how the data looks like. First we create a webrequest to the URL that gives me the dataset we want. In this case, we want to get access to the NowcastSet i.e. current weather. The service actually gets authentication from the headers so we add these two keys & values. We then make the request and read it into a string for parsing later on. ...