The Winter Olympics start this weekend and there’s no shortage of ways to enjoy them. That includes via map mashups showing facilities, parking and the path of the torch relay. All thanks to the Google Maps API and Microsoft’s Bing Maps API.
It’s 54 degrees today in Mountain View, which any Googler could tell you by looking outside… or by using the company’s undocumented weather API. The service was created for use with iGoogle, but the interface is easily discoverable and covers a handful of other features, in addition to weather.
Setlist.fm, a service that allows music buffs to post setlists from live music performances, has opened up access to a beta version of their API.
Last week was a busy one for new APIs and in addition to the 7 new APIs we profiled earlier, here are 6 more new listings from our API directory. These include an API for tracking political and business relationships (an “involuntary facebook of powerful Americans”), a real-time website analytics service API, an API for getting the Mood of the Nation, a ringtone search API, a museum geolocation service, and an API for internet hosting and resellers.
This past week 15 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 40 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include BooRah Restaurant Search, FlightStats, Google Wave, Livekick, Mobypicture and True Knowledge. The most often used APIs this week are Flickr, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Search (6 APIs, 8 mashups), Mapping (5 APIs, 13 mashups) and Photos (4 APIs, 7 mashups).
Last October we covered the launch of NYC BigApps, a government data contest aimed at rewarding developers for development of applications that utilized information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov data mine. The contest drew quite a bit of attention and enthusiasm, given the size of the city and the number of data sets that were made available. Now the contest has concluded and the winners were announced last night.
A new iPhone app is trying to take the fiction out of Science Fiction. Movies have long portrayed people in the future speaking commands to computers. Siri, based on $200M of research and development, is trying to make it so.
Here’s a novel concept to encourage open government applications: pay your best developers. Apparently that’s exactly what the UK’s Office of Public Sector Information would like to do now that it has launched Data.gov.uk.
The U.S. Federal Government has been making a push to increase accessibility to data managed and maintained by various government agencies and departments. Recently Business.gov, the government’s official web site for small businesses (sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration), has released an API that provides access to various types of data that will can benefit small businesses.
Two days, a room full of hackers and one theme: music. This is the premise behind the Stockholm Music Hack Day, which resulted in 31 projects including hardware hacks, mobile, web and desktop applications. A number of the web applications are live and available for anyone to use.
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