Layar, the World’s leading mobile augmented reality platform, had thrown open the Layar Creation Challenge this August. Developers were asked to use the Layar Vision API to create their own layers on top of the Layar Browser and provide new experiences that merged the physical world with the digital world. The results are out and the winners were able to successfully demonstrate not just viewing additional content but also being able to translate that to commerce. The entries were invited in 4 categories: Magazines, Books, Self Publishing and Anything Goes. The prize money totalled $55K with $15K, $10K and $5K for the top 3 winners.
Mashery has expanded its API management solution to operate on-premise, within your company’s firewall, with a new offering dubbed Mashery Local. Until recently, providers could only deploy Mashery’s API traffic management tools in the cloud. With the new Mashery Local customers has more flexibility, which could see more APIs from larger enterprises.
Out of a beige windowless office in Chicago comes a product that just might revolutionize what you thought was possible on the web. X-Stream.ly is a pure play API service offering low-latency high throughput real time messaging with no server side coding required. The x-stream.ly API is a pretty competitive offering in the real time API space.
This week we had 50 new APIs added to our API directory including an online payment service, image recognition service, backend-as-a-service platform, video hosting and publishing platform, crowdsourcing platform for startup funding and an app translation management service. We also previewd New York City’s thrid annual BigApps conference. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 14 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 23 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include 8coupons, AddThis Analytics , Education.com, iFixit, KooKoo, Sears and Wordstream Keyword Tool. The most often used APIs this week are 8coupons, Google Maps and Twilio. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Shopping (5 APIs, 6 mashups), Mapping (3 APIs, 5 mashups) and Telephony (2 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
At ProgrammableWeb, we’ve recently marked some important milestones passing 4,000 APIs and 6,000 mashups in our directory. The growth of our directory continues to accelerate and our ability to keep bringing you this content as well as the latest news about the open web is due to the support of our sponsors and partners. We’re pleased to offer you this chance to learn more about the companies that make our site possible.
Taking photos is great but what good are all those pictures if you can’t share them with others? We come across lots of photo mashups and below we’ll take a look at some of the best that have recently been added. These mashups share and search for images geographically, view pictures posted on Instagram photo steams and even push photos between phones. Popular APIs such as the Flickr API and GoogleMaps API are featured multiple times as expected. Meanwhile relative newcomer Instagram, which we previously covered, is proving to be increasingly popular with developers appearing three times.
Google App Engine has generated a lot of buzz among Developers in the last few months. When it announced changes to its pricing, developers did not take to it kindly and coupled with the fact that various other cloud PaaS offerings have emerged, it was imperative for Google to address it with not just changes but also new releases, packed with features that developers will appreciate.
Data Mining is big business. Various start-ups are aiming to sift through user data in order to create more personalized experiences. Rapleaf, which provides the Rapleaf personalization API, has just announced the first round winners of the Rapleaf Personalization Fund. The no equity fund was announced last month and mostly provides services from Rapleaf and partner companies. Among the first round of winners are some great examples of using personalization data.
Google has a lot of APIs, more than any other company we track. Perhaps as part of adding many APIs, the search giant also has to remove them from time to time. Recently the company has become more liberal in its platform pruning, with at least three separate announcements this year. Most recently Google dropped three more APIs, including the Google Buzz API.
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