If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you about Freshmeat. This repository of open source code and projects has been around quite a while, and is used by a number of prominent projects. What you may not know, however, is that Freshmeat offers a well-designed Freshmeat API to help developers access the data on Freshmeat for any purpose that makes sense.
Factual continues to spread its points of interest database across the Internet. SimpleGeo will incorporate Factual’s business listings into its SimpleGeo Places API. Developers will then be able to access 30 million places across 45 countries to become what is likely the largest business listings database available via API. Factual is also the source of Facebook’s popular Places feature.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation recently launched an apps contest for the rest of us. Unlike the NYC BigApps 1.0 and 2.0 contests the NYC BigApps Ideas Challenge is aimed at discovering problems that need solving. Participants can compete by going to a website powered by ChallengePost and filling in the blank for “I want an NYC app that…” The contest is open to both developers and non-developers and no special skills are required. So if you drive a cab, work as a podiatrist, or eke by as freelance tech writer this is your chance to contribute.
Taking pictures on your iPhone gives you a great deal of data embedded in to your photos. Location, camera type, exposure, even camera orientation. But what if you want more. Well, MetaPhoto (currently available on the iPhone) aims to further enrich your photos. Using the Urban Mapping API, MetaPhoto looks up a great deal of information about the area a photo was taken and adds it to the photos header.
Do you love to mining the amount of data that various Web APIs throw at you and coming up with interesting visualizations? If yes and you live in the Bay Area, the Web Mining Hack Day, a one day event could be your ticket to network with fellow web data mining enthusiasts, learn about the APIs and win some cool prizes.
Google App Engine has adopted the mantra of frequent releases and in keeping line with that, it announced a new version of its App Engine SDK. Like other recent releases, it included several bug fixes, but much more interesting are the new features it introduced, including automatic geolocation of users.
If there is a segment that is ripe for integration it is travel. APIs in the travel segment have been around for a very long time. In fact, some of the earliest APIs are based on Electronic Data Interchange, which dates back to the 1960s. Granted many of these connections are highly complex enterprise only integrations, it is a history that should bode well for modern day integrations, should it not? Despite a long history of interconnectedness, much of the travel space still remains behind closed doors. The major global distribution systems, represented by Sabre, Travelport, and Amadeus all offer powerful APIs of their own, but their commercial requirements tend to be out of the league of most application developers.
In spite of the limitations the travel industry has effectively self imposed, there still exists many opportunities to monetize sites using travel APIs. There are several types of APIs available in the travel space. Most are transactional and some are content driven. Let’s take a look a broad categorization of available travel APIs.
Companies are creating plenty of content on the social web, but not much of it ends up back on their sites. A new aggregator for social media, news and others sources is trying to change that. The company behind the Yolink API created Postano, a tool set to launch today that will let anyone curate a real-time newspaper-like site using Facebook Pages and Twitter streams. The resulting content, tiled on the page with extracted visuals, is available from a standalone site for free or can be embedded for a monthly charge.
Thrutu is an Android app that helps users exchange information while talking on the phone. With one click, people can exchange their current locations, pictures either through the camera or from your gallery, and contacts. However, people might want to use this data-sharing capability to exchange other things during a call, too. Thrutu facilitates this through custom buttons via the Thrutu API.
The Netflix API launched in 2008 with the same hope as many API providers: to attract developers who would build amazing applications on top of the service. Fast-forward 3 years: with more than 23 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, Netflix is the world’s leading Internet subscription service and the way in which millions of people are watching movies and TV shows — not just via DVDs shipped to their home, but increasingly online.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
