The fine folks over at Miso have announced a developer competition and are extending a warm invitation to the Boxee family to compete.  Miso serves up a piping hot social TV platform for checking into your favorite shows, earning points and badges while discovering what fun stuff your friends are watching.  We share a lot of users in common and now they’re rolling out the red carpet to our development crew to kick out some tight social TV apps.

Here’s the skinny:

Deadline: 10 May 2011, noon Pacific Daylight Time.

Prize: A brand spanking new iPad 2, ready for our upcoming Boxee iOS app.

Rules: Must leverage the Miso API to do something awesome.

What kind of awesome can be built with Miso and Boxee?  Oh how about some of these tasty treats:

• Auto check-ins on Miso when you watch shows on Boxee
• Change show on Boxee based upon what your friends watch in Miso
• Notification when a new episode of a show you follow on Miso is available on Boxee
• Check out your friends’ favorite shows
• Leave notes on shows for your friends to see
• A Boxee app hinting on how what would be best to watch to earn Miso badges
• Create an auto-running playlist Boxee app based on Miso trends

The ideas just fly off the fingers.  More details are available at the Miso blog including their sign-up form.

As usual, I’m here to make sure you win.  Hit me up on IRC at FreeNode at #boxee, on Twitter at @boxee_api and via email at rob [at] boxee [dot] tv if you run into any snags.

Go get ‘em!

This past weekend Idan and I represented Boxee at Music Hack Day in San Francisco, a rad hackathon event focused on music technologists of every stripe.  We met some very enthusiastic Boxee users, met some top notch engineering talent, and saw some singular hacks over the course of the weekend.

Winning our top prize for bringing the electronic music community BeatPort to Boxee with a soon-to-be-released Boxee app was Grant Goodale (@ggodale)!  Called BeatBox, the app allows users to flip through the top 100 most popular and recently released tracks as well as browse by genre through BeatPort’s huge catalog of electro tunes.  Grant put together the killer hack in 18 total hours of development time with no previous Python experience. Grant had this to say about the experience:

I’m impressed at how easy it is to build great apps for Boxee.

In addition to meeting Grant, we got to get some quality hack time in with a pair of developers to work on our own hack called JuxBux.  Joined by Noah Zoschke (@nzoschke) from Heroku and Antoine Margurie (@antoinem) from Fairtilizer, we produced a social music jukebox game for Boxee.

The scenario stems from a frustration common to many New York startups: space.  With the limited office space in Manhattan, most startups can only reasonably have one set of speakers going at one time, leading to a natural conflict of musical tastes.  JuxBux turns that conflict into a social game by creating a jukebox controlled by the crowdsourced selection of those present in the office.  Users can submit tracks to the queue, vote on the current playing track, and expend the points they earn on instant plays and vetoes.  We’re planning on continuing development on this hack and doing a public release soon.

Many thanks to Noah and Antoine for lending their extensive talent to the project – it was great working with you!

Got a developer event you think Boxee should represent at?  Talk to Idan at idan [at] boxee [dot] tv!

Part of what I love about my home theatre rig is playing music through Boxee. Whether it’s my music library or streaming apps like Pandora and Last.fm, Boxee’s gorgeous interface is the first listening experience I’ve used that feels native to a living room. Music apps continue to be strongly represented in our Top 25 apps each week and with this month’s Music Tech Summit in San Francisco, we see a prime opportunity to up that count even more.

Idan and I will be attending this year’s Music Hack Day to connect with the brightest developers in the music industry and we’re bringing a sack of goodies along. On hand to help hackers bring music services to the television, we’re holding another friendly hacker face-off with a serious prize up for grabs: a Boxee Box as soon as it is available.

This 15-16 May, we’ll be awarding the hotly anticipated hardware from our partners at D-Link to the best music app to be completed at the weekend codefest. And, if that wasn’t enough, we’ll have a Boxee T-shirt for every hacker that completes a Boxee app during the fest.

All you need to win is to get on the waitlist for the event, show up ready to hack, and produce an app that is ear-popping, face-melting, brain-blistering wholesale-monkey-rodeo awesome.

Well, maybe not this awesome…

…but something close.