TokBox, the web-based video chat and conferencing application, has announced a change in directions. Its popular TokBox application shall cease to be available and instead the company will focus on its OpenTok API, with all its energies on increasing API adoption with a developer contest to go along with it. To get the ball rolling, today it’s announced 30 new partners already on the platform.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has announced the opening of public voting for the NYC BigApps 2.0 Competition. The big apple has wasted no time in following last year’s successful competition with 350 datasets from over 40 agencies. From the looks of the apps, the NYC tech community is already fired up about the competition.
Wordnik, which aims to be the most comprehensive online dictionary, has been hard at work for over a year with a clear focus on scaling its architecture and listening to developer feedback. The result is significant updates to the Wordnik API and a new developer portal to increase adoption of its API.
Access to software that performs complex operations has been, and can still be, costly. Paying for expensive licenses can mean an alternative solution has to be sought or worse still, a feature won’t be developed at all. Thanks to virtualization and a many other cloud features, we’ve seen these complex operations offered as services at a fraction of the cost. One such complex operation is that of facial recognition. This software hasn’t seemed accessible at all with only applications such as Google Picasa, Apple’s iPhoto, Facebook and more recently XBox Kinect being the most obvious examples where it has been used. These are big companies with big money to spend. This now changes as Face.com is offering a free to use face recognition API for photos.
Read-it-later service Instapaper has released what it’s calling a “full API.” With it, developers using the Instapaper API can create applications that both write to and read from the service. The full API is free to developers, but only paying users can read from their Instapaper account using third-party tools.
If you’re in a new city and want some grub, how do you decide where to go? Many of us use Yelp or other review sites. Others want a way to cut through the cruft. That’s where these mashups come in. Each one finds a different way to locate restaurants to try, either through curation, semantic analysis or simply where there are deals.
The initial releases from credit card provider MasterCard look to be more than a toe-dip into APIs. With its MasterCard Payments API and two others, the company could be diving straight into the deep end. Though the services are still in beta, MasterCard appears to be taking very seriously its creation of a developer ecosystem.
There isn’t just one social graph, there are many. LinkedIn maintains your professional contacts, while Facebook has friends and family (and yes, often many professional). Twitter has some mix, as well, perhaps with a different filter. Aggregators take these disparate contacts and bring them into one place. A new service uses several APIs to merge them and give tools to better understand and utilize your network of contacts.
Online invoicing and time tracking service FreshBooks has a revolutionary new feature for developers using its FreshBooks API: an opportunity to make money through the company’s current customer base. Through the program, developers can charge users a monthly fee, which is tacked on to what subscribers are already paying FreshBooks. The solution, another revenue stream for FreshBooks and a rare one for developers, marks a potential new approach for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and one FreshBooks thinks has a bright future.
After holding off for months on an official API, popular photo sharing service Instagram has opened sign-ups for a public beta of its Instagram API. With it, developers can access the 300,000 photos uploaded daily by its more than 2 million users.
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