Boxee, the classy cross platform media centre, is running a great little competition over the next few weeks. It’s urging coders to band together and come up with hacks that combine Boxee with VOIP phone calling skills, so you can chat with others without hunching over a laptop. The best idea wins a netbook, and a brand new Boxee Box media streamer before release!
LG and Cisco have been dabbling with video chatting on TVs, but Boxee wants to bring some of those cheap chatting skills to its software too, and to do so, it’s turned to crowdsourcing. It’s hooked up with a San Francisco start up, Twilio, that adds call and text skills to web apps, and wants people all over the world to help bring the two together.
Anyone interested has got from now until 12 April to “unite the telephone and the television in an awesome way”, for the chance to win a Boxee Box, or the excellent Acer Aspire Revo nettop PC runner up prize, and Boxee is hosting hackathons in San Francisco and New York from 10 April for the finals.
What we’re most excited about over here though is Boxee’s push to add more interactive (and free) skills into its already solid software. We love the idea of being able to make a phone call, or have texts we’ve received pop up on screen, and if these features make it onto the Boxee Box, typing would be easy thanks to the QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote.
If you’ve got an idea, Boxee has all the details you need to get started, and if you’re an interested bystander, you can expect the upstart company to shout out any innovations from the rooftop, so you can bet we’ll hear more soon.
