Fwix, the local information provider, has released its Fwix Location API at this week’s Where 2.0 conference. But the company isn’t looking to become just another source of location data in developers’ toolboxes. Fwix founder Darian Shirazi explained to us that he hopes to “establish [Fwix] as the underlying platform for geodata” by providing rich, high-quality place information that meets a broad range of developer needs.
Sometimes, when assessing a website, it helps to know how popular it is. These days, there are a lot of ways to learn this, including a few recent mashups. There are also other apps that assess popularity, using different APIs and analysis to do so. Below we have a selection of some of the recent mashups that dig into determining ranking and popularity.
E-signature company DocuSign is celebrating its new San Francisco office with a Hackathon on May 14 and 15. The event will bring developers together to build atop its DocuSign Enterprise API. After 35 non-stop hours of heated competition, four winners will receive $25,000 (USD) cash prizes.
Developers with their own geographic imagery will soon be able to publish it as a layer on the Google Maps API and Google Earth API. Dubbed Google Earth Builder, the service will launch in the third quarter. From the looks of the announcement here at Where 2.0 conference, Google is dipping its toe into the traditional GIS industry. The maps developers upload will be available via API, but only to enterprise customers who pay Google for geo services.
“Hey Smitty, I got this guy’s email address. Can you do some digging and tell me more about ‘em? How much does he make? What are his hobbies? Oh, and I want to see pictures of his pet dog too. Can you do it?”
“Yea boss, I’ll get you your information, buckets full of it. I’ll make it rain!”
This is the imaginary old timey gangster context I imagine around the idea behind Rainmaker, its contacts service and Rainmaker API.
Naming itself the eBay of the shipping world, uShip brings the bidding process to the transport marketplace. Need to move a boat? Champion horses? Tractor? Everything in your house? Put the job up for bidding and let the transport companies come to you. All transport companies have detailed profiles that show you just who you’ll be dealing with. For example, these guys would like to help move your motorcycle.
Now I don’t have a master’s degree in Natural language processing, and you just might need one to get your hands dirty with this API. I see the text-processing.com API as offering a mid-level utility for incorporation in a web app. You might take text samples from your source, feed them through the Text-Processing API and analyze those results a bit further before presenting anything to your user.
FirstGiving maintains a searchable database of all US non-profit organizations, and also provides a secure donation pathway allowing one to contribute to anyone of them. It is the meta-charity donation gateway, sure to come as a technological boost to many charities which likely do not have electronic donation processing systems in place on the web. The FirstGiving API is only the 5th in our directory tagged charity, proving it a potentially under-served sector, technology-wise. To be precise, not all non-profit organizations are charitable, and so the user of this system should know the difference when electing to contribute his or her funds, though FirstGiving can process funds for any non-profit.
The digital world has swamped us with an overload of information. Try and note down how many online services that we use on a daily basis, whether for work or for personal use. We access Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and much more. We universally agree that getting notified about a certain event say “a new post on your Facebook wall” or a “new blog post” is much better than constantly switching between applications and checking for updates. But getting notified of events is just one part of the puzzle. Once we receive an event, there are times that you want others to know about it by posting in your blog or tweeting about it. “If This Then That,” or ifttt, is just the digital duct tape that aims to solve this problem in an intuitive and non-programmer centric fashion.
International tech blog The Next Web’s flagship conference is coming next week to Amsterdam. As part of the event, there will be a two day hackathon, which will bring 200 European developers together to build new, innovative apps out of SDKs and APIs. With partners like Blackberry, Amazon Web Services and the MailChimp API, it’s a good chance to meet fellow devs and create something new and cool.
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