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A consortium of leading German organizations has launched a contest soliciting visionary ideas for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.

“The project was originated by Deloitte in Germany, who provide thought leadership in the area of machine-to-machine communication (M2M), together with HYVE, a Deloitte partner and specialist in the area of innovation and community management. Deutsche Telekom joined the consortium, as has RWTH Aachen University, an academic partner of HYVE,” says Wolfgang Kathan of HYVE.

Christened Ideabird, the consortium defines M2M as any technology that allows machines to communicate directly with each other.

Rather than focus on short-term innovation, Ideabird is setting its sites on identifying ideas, concepts and trends that will emerge in the future. In addition to APIs we can expect special emphasis on location-based services, GPS, lightweight batteries and technologies that are critically associated with telecommunications.

Submissions will be accepted in a wide array of categories that include home, animals, sports, healthcare, security and others.

The contest will award $1,000, $3,000 and $5,000 US and submissions will be evaluated on their novelty, creativity and utility. There’s an additional $1000 prize for the best concept design.

While this is a competition, Ideabird is promoting crowd sourcing and collaboration. All entries are public and any registrant on the site can comment upon or help refine submitted ideas.

“Active participation and discussion is encouraged within one week more than 550 comments on ideas were contributed and more than 400 idea evaluations have been submitted,” added Kathan.

Ideas submitted so far include a mobile app that feeds your cat when you are away from home, tracking devices for personal items, and remote sensors for optimizing the energy efficiency of urban street lights.

Submissions will be accepted through April 10, 2012 and winners will be announced in May.

Award winners will be invited to meet with industry leaders in Dusseldorf. Additionally, a larger group of selected participants will be invited to attend an innovation workshop in Aachen.

Answers from Wolfgang:

The technology page on the website appears to focus on mobile devices
(location-based services, lightweight batteries, etc.) but the scope
of the contest actually seems broader. Will the contest favor ideas
that are associated with mobile devices, like smartphones?

The actual scope of the contest focuses on “find & follow” use cases covering nearly all life and business areas as well as all available technologies. Ideas associated with smartphones will not be favored. The jury will select the winners by using the community’s evaluation criteria 1) Degree of novelty, 2) Grade of freakiness and 3) Tendency to use, independent from the enabling technology.

How is the collaborative/community aspects of the project going? Have
people been participating in dialog around ideas and have any
submissions evolved as a result of the discussion?
As a general goal for such an open innovation contest community it can always be said that an active participation and discussion is encouraged. As for the “ideabird” contest it can be said that members are very active. Within one week more than 550 comments on ideas were contributed and more than 400 idea evaluations have been submitted.
The result of these lively discussions can be seen in the constant development of the ideas. The idea owners always have the possibility to acknowledge comments about their ideas and edit them accordingly.

y degree of freakiness we basically mean how “unique” and new the concept of the idea is. In other words, how radical is the innovation and can this idea be considered part of a “thinking-outside-the-box” approach.

Image: Jaqueline Shatz, Puff, mixed media, approx. 27″ x 24″, 2011 – 2012

Aviary, the web-based image editing solution, is now available via their image editing API to Mailchimp users.

Mailchimp wanted to streamline the email design process. Previously, users would typically exit the mailchimp website to edit images in software applications such as iPhoto or Photoshop. Besides being time-consuming, this fragments the user experience and breaks the workflow.

With the Aviary API, Mailchimp users can now perform basic image editing tasks such as cropping and resizing as well as some more advanced tasks such as rotation and applying creative filters without leaving the mailchimp interface.

“You can now crop, resize, rotate, and enhance your images right inside MailChimp,” says Co-founder Ben Chestnut. “This is using some new API tricks from Aviary, and we really want to thank them for helping with this. When I write my newsletters, the worst part is always when I have to stop and edit an image. I have to open up Photoshop or Fireworks, resize, crop, and upload. Hate it. Now, the experience is fast and seamless. I love Photoshop, but I hate waiting for it to open when I just want to finish an email,” he added.

While many APIs are designed to share assets or expose data to third-party applications, the Aviary API is truly unique because instead of making data available or supporting a sharing function, it provides editing tools, which is closer to a SaaS model than a conventional API.

“Users stay on the site, ensuring a positive workflow from a partners perspective, as well as allowing them to keep their users on their site – which is a win for both parties,” says Nam Nguyan of Aviary.

As more users access their email via mobile devices it will be increasingly important for senders to manage the size of email images. Large files drain bandwidth and perhaps more importantly can cause unexpected email layout problems.

Mailchimp has long pursued a broad API integration strategy and besides having an open API of their own, they’ve actively encouraged developers through their $1 Million Integration Fund since 2010.

Aviary image editing is also available as a web widget and can be embedded into web pages as a JavaScript snippet.

The Cloud Security Alliance Summit brought together a panel of security experts on February 27 in San Francisco to examine the threats posed by API and cloud-based computing. But rather than providing guidance on how to mitigate security risks they focused instead on the uncertain nature of security in an environment that is increasingly dominated by applications that use APIs to transfer data across the cloud.

One of the key benefits of APIs is their anonymous nature. In fact, it is their anonymity that is helping drive their growth. But the ease and speed at which API-based applications can be created has enabled many independent developers to operate without significant attention paid to security.

Meanwhile, the biggest threat to personal Internet security is not APIs or small, independent developers but rather large companies “that collect massive amounts of data from people, including photos, documents, video, search and buying patterns”, says panelist Bruce Schneier.

Panelists pointed out the importance of the token-based authentication system, OAuth, in enabling personal users to authenticate with applications without rendering their credentials. Because OAuth limits access to only one application at a time with limitations of time and scope, it enables authors of applications to provide personalized services without having to independently manage security.

While OAuth may answer the security questions for individual use, as more businesses look to APIs to connect their applications across the cloud, it is only inevitable that security concerns related to enterprise applications will arise.

Panelists included Philippe Courtot, CEO, Qualys; Don Godfrey, security consultant, Humana; Matt Johansen, Threat Research Center manager, WhiteHat Security; Patrick Harding, CTO, Ping Identity.

Image: Lothar Ostenberg, Diorama, dimensions and date unavailable