June 29th, 2007

TopCoder Live Webcast Today

AOL, who now have 10 open APIs listed here, are live webcasting later today the 2007 TopCoder Open from the Mirage Resort in Las Vegas. This has been called the major league of programming competitions with $260,000 in prizes and about 4,600 developers orginally entered worldwide.

See it live at 4pm ET today at dev.aol.com and watch the webcast hosted by ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap. And you can check-out this preview video on their site as well.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as AOL, Contests, Events at 8:04 AM | No Comments »

Lat49 to Help Monetize Map Mashups

One of the primary issues facing map mashup developers isn’t a technical one but a business one: how to make money from their mashups. Often you’ll see Google AdSense ads ringing a mashup as basic strategy for generating a bit of revenue. This problem is one that IDELIX Software, a veteran Canadian developer of visualization tools, is aiming to solve with their new product Lat49.

What is it? It’s a new map-based advertising model targeted directly at this class of online, Ajax-based map applications. Publishers (mashup developers) in addition to using the usual map APIs from Google, Yahoo and others can use a JavaScript API from Lat49 to drive contextually relevant ads. The ads can appear directly within or outside the map. What’s interesting is how the ads can dynamically change as users drag the map around as well as vary based upon their zoom level.

Overall the problems they want to solve for mashup developers in this situation are: screen real estate — maps are often forced to be smaller in order to make room for ads; ad relevancy — the limited amount of text on map-centric page reduces the text usually used to drive ad relevancy algorithms; and lack of ad refreshes — due to Ajax-driven sites that lack the old page reload model.

On the advertisers side, they ‘lease’ space by the ’tile’ of land. Ads can be specified at four different zoom levels ranging from Local, Neighborhood, Urban, to Brand. Pricing and revenue sharing models are being ironed-out now. I spoke with their team yesterday and they’re looking for publishers and advertisers to take part in their current alpha testing and you get their contact information from their site.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Mapping, Money, Tools at 12:21 AM | 3 Comments »

June 28th, 2007

13 Video APIs

With the very recent addition of APIs from video services Veoh and LiveVideo there are now 13 video-related APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb. Some you’re more likely to be familiar with like the YouTube API, the Revver API, the Yahoo Video Search API and the AOL Video API. Others include the Dave.TV, the Blinkx API and the Grouper Video API.

Just like the online video segment itself we’re seeing an explosion of API and mashup activity in this space. There are now 159 mashups tagged “video” the majority of which are built on the YouTube API. And as we recently noted, the YouTube folks are not standing still and have plans for major API updates.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Video at 1:35 AM | 4 Comments »

June 27th, 2007

Digg Mashup Contest Winners

Digg has announced the winners of the Digg API Visualization Contest. You can read about them here on Digg. Ten finalists were selected by the contest team and then Digg community members used their diggs to vote for the winners. The winner? Digg City, shows the 10 newest popular stories. The more popular the story gets, the taller the building. When someone diggs the story a stick figure of that user is added. Figure goes inside the building he has just Dugg.

You can see the second and third place winners in our earlier coverage here and see the Digg API Profile here.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, PopularAllTime, Social at 12:26 AM | 1 Comment »

June 26th, 2007

New APIs: Widgets, Travel and Patents

Here are a few of the more interesting new APIs added to our API listings in the past week. They are top quality entrants in popular categories — our listings include 54 mapping-related APIs, 15 widget-related APIs, and 11 APIs tagged “government”.

• ClearSpring API: The folks at widget creation, deployment and tracking service ClearSpring have been on quite a roll lately with over 4.2 billion widget views for major clients like the NBA and Universal (for more, see this recent TechCrunch review). They have big API plans and the initial pieces are now available including their Placement API for creating widget embed code on the fly.
• ViaMichelin API: A rich API from the very well regarded European travel resources at the Michelin Group. This API includes mapping, both driving and pedestrian directions, geolocation and integrated points of interest.
• Open Patent Services API: A web service for patent lookups from the European Patent Office. A SOAP-based service to return patents in XML.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs, Widgets at 1:33 AM | 1 Comment »

June 25th, 2007

eBay Tops Web 2.0 Developer Survey

eBay topped five other leading Web 2.0 developer programs including Yahoo, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Microsoft in a study published this month by Evans Data Corporation. The 34 page report entitled “Developer’s Choice: Web 2.0 Developer Programs” is based on a recent survey of 400 developers and is available at the EDC site, free registration required. For readers interested in this space it’s a worthwhile read. Some highlights:

• Developers were asked about a range of factors including API functionality, developer support, documentation, certification, marketing assistance, security, downtime, solutions directories and tools.
• The best overall rating went to eBay followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and PayPal respectively.
• Even within a single provider’s program there was a wide range of satisfaction. For example Yahoo and Microsoft scored well in forums and blogs while PayPal and Amazon rated lower on these.
• The financial benefits a program offers makes a big difference with eBay and Amazon scoring well here.

Here’s a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses by vendor:

• PayPal: Scored highest on security but did not fare well on forums and developer community.
• Amazon: Scored highly on financial benefits but respondents gave Amazon lower marks on documentation and outages, which EDC notes is surprising and indeed may be a symptom of expectations more than anything else.
• eBay: Had the most problems with outages and downtime as well as integration difficulty. They scored highly on financial benefits, support and documentation. Their APIs were voted best of the group.
• Google: Rates well for ease of integration, good uptime, and tools. Google scored lower on financial benefit and in the middle on many of the metrics.
• Yahoo: Scored highest in terms of ongoing communication and reasonably well on their APIs and their community services like forums. Yahoo is seen less highly in terms of helping developers make money.
• Microsoft: Scored well on their developer community programs and tools but not so well on integration, direct financial benefit or marketing assistance.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestPractices, Issues, ebay at 12:48 AM | 1 Comment »

June 22nd, 2007

Best Mashups: Geo Trivia, IP Hacks, Firefox

Following-up on the most recent best-of roundups including 3D UFOs and Twitter, YouTube and Last.fm mashups, here are some more interesting mashups from the newest mashups listed:

• What if I walk the world in a straight line?: Imagine where you pass if you take a long walk in a straight line around the world, which places you gonna pass? This mashup answers that question.



• Locate Me: This mashup does what it says. It finds your current location and displays it on a Google Map.



• FireUploader: This is a Firefox extension which allows you to upload, and download photos,files and videos using a user friendly FTP like interface. In this version Flickr, Picasa, Box.net and Youtube are supported. (Another Firefox mashup-based extension is S3Fox Organizer that gives a user friendly interface for the Amazon S3 storage service)

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 12:08 AM | 1 Comment »

June 21st, 2007

Best Mashups: 3D UFOs, Skype and Twitter

Keeping up with what’s new on the mashup front, here is a roundup of some of the more interesting new mashups:

• Skype to-and-from Twitter: A mashup to allow you to post Twitters from Skype and receive your friends Twitter timeline into Skype.



• Moonplex 3D: This Flash-based app lets you upload a photo of your house to see it in 3D on the moon.



• UFO Maps 3D: On a similar 3D vein, compliments of the Poly9 FreeEarth API, you could also see the latest UFO sightings on a 3d globe.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 12:08 AM | 2 Comments »

June 20th, 2007

New APIs: Videos, Photos and Phones

A few new entries of the 453 listed here cover video, photos-plus-maps, and purchasing phone services. Note that video APIs continue to proliferate, there are now 12 APIs tagged video in our listings. Here are more details on the new APIs:

• Panoramio API: This Spanish service lets users geolocate, store and organize their photographs and to view those photographs in Google Earth and Google Maps. They launched their own API shortly before their very recent acquisition by Google. It’s another example of an “API stack”, or an API offered by a service that’s built on another service’s API. For more on Panoramio see our recent post on Google Buys Mashup.
• PhoneDog API: An API to research, compare prices, and shop for phone products and services.
• LiveVideo: A new video sharing service (not “Live” from Microsoft in this case) with a REST-based API.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

June 19th, 2007

Etelos as SMB Platform

While most of the news in the enterprise SaaS space is often generated by Salesforce.com, another smaller but very interesting player is Etelos who offer a general-purpose multi-tenant application platform designed for the SMB market. Their strategy is to help those companies and the thousands of ISVs that serve them to have a fully hosted, scalable development platform for a variety of vertical business applications. They’ve been around for a few years and now have about 850 developers offering over 200 applications.

One example application was recently created by Etelos themselves: Etelos CRM for Google Apps. It’s a composite CRM-type system that’s delivered as a customized Google start page incorporating a number of their own modules to create a gadgetized contact, account, project, and task system. For Etolos developers they provide the source code for this as the starting point for other apps.

Overall it’s an interesting evolution of the strategy Microsoft has successfully employed for years: cater to the many smaller independent developers out there building thousands of customized niche applications. Each app needs many of the same components, so the argument is we’ll help you with those re-usable components and also take care of some of the dirty work like licensing, accounting and so on. These are also the types features and benefits that Salesforce.com’s AppExchange provides. I spoke with CEO Danny Kolke and he pointed-out that one of their advantages is that customers can at any time opt to license and install their application on their own systems, so they are not restricted to only the hosted solution.

More on Etelos from ZDNet’s Dan Farber and Jeff Nolan. You can also see of video of Danny demoing the product to Robert Scoble over on PodTech.net.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Enterprise at 12:37 AM | 1 Comment »