At the competition we won:

• Runner up Best Hack Overall
• Runner up Biggest Market Potential
• Best Mobile Hack

I think that’s pretty kick-ass!

Hat tip to Jonathan Snook, Harry Brundage, and Paul Irish. I think I remembered everyone.

When I see repos like this on Github, something truly useful that developers have made free and open, it reminds me why I love being a developer.

The important parts are to only do a HEAD lookup or you will grab the entire file, be sure to set a timeout (especially in the instance of jsonp, which as I mentioned, won’t return a traditional 404) and be sure to set your dataType correctly.

The code:

Or see it in action on jsFiddle.

Brisbane start-up We Are Hunted has struck a partnership deal with online music giant Spotify that will see its technology rolled out on a global basis.

Spotify, which is set to launch in Australia early next year, recommends music to users based on their existing preferences. It has already enjoyed success in the US and Europe.

Spotify has chosen 10 partners to work with on its new App Finder service, including US music bible Rolling Stone.

However, We Are Hunted is the only Australian business to be included on Spotify’s new platform.

The company, which was founded in 2008, provides the top 99 tracks being talked about, blogged, shared and reviewed online each day.

Aimed at helping people discover new music, We Are Hunted will be used by Spotify to offer its customers a way to access new artists, rather than just established bands.

Richard Slatter, co-founder of We Are Hunted, tells StartupSmart that the platform, which launched yesterday, provides a good fit between the two businesses.

“We can help Spotify’s functionality and allow them to focus on what they do well,” he says.

“Spotify has 15 million tracks on it, so the question is, what do you play? Invariably, people choose music they already know.”

“If you like Snow Patrol, for example, it’s easy to say that you’ll also like Coldplay. You probably already listen to them. But out technology tells you who the next Bob Dylan is, if you’re a Dylan fan. You have to keep people excited by new things, which isn’t easy to do.”

“There is no financial deal with Spotify. We just want to get people participating. We’ve already seen a rise in traffic to our site.”

This article first appeared on StartupSmart

Perhaps the most beautiful of the new Spotify apps, We Are Hunted is a music recommendation engine that breaks music into several searchable categories:

1. Emerging Chart: The 99 most popular songs by emerging artists, ranked in terms of their popularity on We Are Hunted.
2. Mainstream Chart: The 99 most played songs by Mainstream Artists.
3. Genre Chart: The 99 most played songs in seven genres.
4. Instant Playlist: Enter an artist and have a custom 99-song-long We Are Hunted playlist made just for you. Above, a playlist based on my love of The Avalanches.

A great HTML5 design by the Australian team at We Are Hunted makes this app a rich and rewarding music discovery experience on Spotify.

We Are Hunted, perhaps the most intriguing app of the bunch, builds top song charts for you based on social media, P2P networks, message boards, iTunes downloads and Last.fm scrobbles. Aesthetically, it looks quite different from Billboard’s app with large pictures of the artists or bands in order of their popularity.

To try the new apps you’ll need to grab the preview version of Spotify. The first thing you’ll notice is that the What’s New section which pops up on launch has had a big redesign. Ignore that and hit the App Finder icon in the sidebar.

You’ll see a familiar, Apple App Store-like list, right now containing just 11 apps. These run from a simple list of reviews with linked songs (the Guardian) through lyrics (TuneWiki) to full-on playlist generators (Moodagent). Just click to install.

This last, Moodagent, lets you build a playlist either by picking your mood, or by dragging a song into the app. It then build a “song curve” which shows how the mood changes throughout the list. You can tweak this curve, making the list build and build, or get angrier or happier. It’s fun to use.

My favorite, though, is the app from We Are Hunted, which just gives you a grid of emerging artists (you can also choose mainstream artists, or a specific genre). Just click to play, and sample new music. There’s already a great iOS-tuned webpage that does the same thing (I have it saved to my iPad’s home screen). The difference here is that if you like an artist, you can listen to all their music right there in Spotify.

Spotify says that more apps are on the way. “Lots of them,” in fact. As someone who pretty much listens to the same old things over and over, I’m pretty excited by this.