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This week at Brickhouse, it's all about hosting organizations we love who just happen to have all-caps names. On Wednesday, our friends at NASA are visiting to tell us about their World Wind project, an open source 3D interactive world viewer. Patrick Hogan, Project Manager and Randy Kim, UI, Data and Graphics Lead will be joining us. Sign up on Upcoming. This is part of our continued hosting and support of the Luna Philosophie series from the NASA CoLab team.

On Thursday, we have Stefan Magdalinski from MOO talking about the MOO API and how you can use it to produce and deliver beautiful and delightful cards, stickers, and postcards from MOO. See all the event details on Upcoming.

Both events include the requisite pizza and beer. Stay tuned for more Brickhouse events!

Photo credits: Richard Moross and NASA/Reto Stöckli

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Last week, the Fire Eagle development team hosted an informal evening meetup at Yahoo!'s Brickhouse office to share news about Fire Eagle, a system that brokers location information and helps users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet. Fire Eagle launched at ETech earlier this month.

In this video, Tom Coates describes some of the first Fire Eagle apps that are emerging, like an integration with Dopplr and a plugin for Movable Type, and shares ideas and imaginings for new location-aware services.

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Developer evangelist Christian Heilmann was captured in Paris late last year, humoring a post-prandial crowd of European web developers and sharing the wisdom of web standards, as well as a humorous bit on how (and when) to make the international sign for "bullsh*t." He also discusses the benefits of web standards and the value of taking the long view, for increasing the resilience, flexibility, and maintainability of web projects.

You can watch the video, thanks to the generous permission of the Paris Web 2007 conference organizers.

Or take a quick trip through Chris's presentation, thanks to SlideShare.net:

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Keep an eye out for Yahoos in San Diego this week -- at the O'Reilly ETech 2008 conference (March 3-6) and the adjacent Graphing Social Patterns West:The Business and Technology of Social Networking Platforms (March 3-4).

On Monday at 1:15pm, Ian Kennedy will introduce Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog API: A Social Network Lookup Service in San Diego Ballroom B. At 1:30pm, he'll join panelists from Google, FriendFeed, Six Apart, and mSpoke, to discuss Social Networks and the Need for Feeds.

Meantime, over at ETech, food-hacker and engineer Marc Powell will present a tutorial called Kitchen Hack Lab in Marina Ballroom E at 1:30pm.

On Tuesday at 11:50am, in Marina Ballroom D, Elizabeth Churchill, from Yahoo! Research, will give a talk titled Users, Socializers, and Producers: How Internet Technologies are Changing Our View of Ourselves.

Stay tuned for later in the week; we've got something mythic in the works.

The Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring both these events. You'll know us by our mugs at the GSP Monday morning coffee break, at ETech we'll be at Booth #9. Stop by and say hello if you're in town, otherwise, check in at the Yahoo! Developer Network theater for ongoing video highlights, interviews, and coverage from GSP and ETech.

Yahoo! Developer Network Mixer photo by Jeff Kubina (2006).

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On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.

AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.

Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.

We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.

Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.

Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."

In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”

Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

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