Hopefully by now you’ve heard about our SmartFile Platform Bake-Off (if not, read more about it here). This competition is all about API integration and creating apps. We want students to figure out new and exciting ways to use SmartFile while gaining real world experience with open source programming and APIs. We’re looking for web apps, desktop apps, mobile apps, SmartFile widgets, or whatever you can think of! This is an example of an integration to Flickr, we’re looking for this except into SmartFile.
Here is a short list of project ideas from our CTO, Ben Timby…
- Could expand to sit on mail stream and archive ingoing/outgoing mail for an entire organization.
- Simple file-2-email – One step process, uses upload/link capability. Files expire after 24h.
- Allow user to post a file, generate a public URL – Files that are unpopular are deleted, only popular files remain hosted. Have a top 100 list of popular files, and search. Kind of like file sharing, with a bit of competition to post the most popular files.
- Media locker – Use a protocol like Subsonic to host/play media files on many devices (desktop, mobile etc). Clients (Android, iOS) are open source. This service would do playlists, tagging, media management and playback on top of our storage.
- CloudCrypt Integration– Allow uploading/downloading of files to any supported cloud provider. Encryption key is managed by user, user does not need to trust cloud provider, their data is encrypted and inaccessible to the provider.
- Browser Extension – Turns “file upload” fields into “choose file from SmartFile”, so the user does not have to download from SmartFile and upload elsewhere. Could also support other cloud providers, allowing exchanging files or consumption of files directly from cloud.
- Bookmarklet or Extension – Allows directly transferring files from websites into SmartFile (again no need to download then upload). Kinda like pintrest, on a site, click the bookmarklet choose the files to “import” and they are sucked into SmartFile.
Don’t forget that SmartFile is mostly a business file sharing provider, so some other integration ideas for businesses could be…
- Enterprise app usage
- Integration with a financial package (OpenERP, Tryton, etc.)
- Integration with portal software (JBoss)
- SalesForce integration
- Integration with health record providers (Indivo)
- Integration into health-care related services
- Integration into Apache Libcloud
“Basically, anything that allows integration with non-cooperating entities. Targeted integration with a 3rd party is good, but integrating with an entire category is a potential winner.” -Ben Timby, SmartFile CTO
The possibilities are endless. There are so many APIs and other resources out there that you can craft into a great SmartFile integration. Please let us know any ideas you can think of in the comments or on Twitter with the hashtag #SFbakeoff!