Participate in BlankSlate's Private Beta

[Kael Goodman]

Hi All,

I am the former CIO of the NYC Departments of Correction & Probation and my company's cloud platform BlankSlate is currently in Private Beta. We are looking for early-adopters to try it out. There are some great use cases for open government. Here is the official invite:

Hello, you are invited to take part in the BlankSlate Private Beta.

BlankSlate is a cloud platform that enables you to access data management resources through simple readable and writable REST APIs. BlankSlate is schema-less and can scale to millions and millions of records. It offers the functions of a traditional database without the administrative overhead.. so you can focus on content, letting BlankSlate focus on managing data.

BlankSlate is the work of Ning Zhou, who was previously an IBM software architect, and Kael Goodman, who was previously a CIO of two NYC government agencies.

You can do a lot with BlankSlate...

** Like build all kinds of apps. Some examples are here:
http://www.esellerads.com (uses most of the BlankSlate APIs and also the Etsy API)
http://www.brownstoner.com/directory/join.php (this page uses the BlankSlate form submit API)

** Like connect your existing systems to BlankSlate and immediately have public APIs for your friends, colleagues, customers, and the public to use. Here is a public API that makes 5.5 million NYC.gov records available: http://www.blocksandlots.com (uploaded to BlankSlate in 45 spreadsheets)

You are welcome to try out all the Cloud API Data Services available on BlankSlate. You can add records by uploading spreadsheets, connect your APIs to web forms to collect new data, or connect your APIs programmatically to existing applications. You can use most any programming language you like with the BlankSlate APIs.

Some of the apps shown above use additional BlankSlate APIs for user management, file management, and ecommerce that are not available in the BlankSlate Beta. We look forward to making these APIs available soon.

We are looking for feedback: suggestions, bugs, praise, concerns, feature requests, business development ideas, how you used BlankSlate, etc. and will happily showcase stuff using BlankSlate.

BlankSlate's cloud implementation is built on Amazon Web Services. It uses Amazon MySQL instances thru Amazon RDS and also Amazon's EC2 and ELB. Though using relational databases, part of BlankSlate's magic is that it is schema-less. The enterprise version of BlankSlate can run using any relational database and J2EE app server.

Finally, we're looking for talented people to work with us in both platform development and in professional services.

To be included in the beta program, go here: http://blankslate.com/contact.html

Thanks!

[Lou Klepner]

This just out from Google -- 

Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs...  

Public Data Explorer

http://www.google.com/publicdata/home

Have data to add?

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/request.py?contact_type=public_data