Last week, for the first time I had the opportunity to attend the Glue conference in Broomfield, CO. An aptly named conference, Glue’s mission is to provide a technical forum for web application builders, architects, and integrators to talk about the various technologies that stick together to make a web platform and its associated applications. It’s one of the most exciting and nerdy places you can go, and it’s well worth the investment if you’re in this industry. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this conference is the co-mingling of Big Enterprise and Scrappy Start-up.
This past week 8 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 15 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Gecko Landmarks, MapBox, Mogreet, TripAdvisor and WMATA. The most often used APIs this week are Expedia, Facebook Graph and Google Maps. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (4 APIs, 5 mashups), Mapping (4 APIs, 6 mashups) and Travel (2 APIs, 2 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Looking through our directory of travel APIs and getting lost? That’s no surprise; we’ve cataloged 168 of them so far. Fortunately, Valentin Dombrovsky, CEO of Travelatus did a great service by focusing on the 5 he says, “are the ones that offer interesting opportunities for your site—no matter who you are, an OTA, an airline or a hotel chain, for example.” Writing for Tnooz, the magazine that talks travel tech, his 5 picks are rome2rio, DealAngel, Evature, Flightstats, and InKnowledge’s Taxi Fare Calculator.
Why the New York Times is key to the future. Open innovation and the distributed business model. Plus: service tracks API client library changes, Twitter advertising API, and 24 new APIs.
Facebook removes Instagram app usage metrics from its API. AngelList’s API is now handling over 3 million requests each day. Plus: Expedia’s partnership with Room 77 begins to pay off, Codecademy offering API-focused lessons and 13 new APIs.
Major airlines want a better way to sell to consumers and they’ve been working on the design for over a year already. In this new model, the current delivery of prices would be completely changed. Will this be a potentially lucrative API development opportunity? Just how cutting edge will this new approach be?
FlightStats, leading provider of global flight information, has launched the FlightStats Flex APIs to put FlightStats’ rich data in the hands of third-party developers. The product is a suite of APIs that allows developers access to a variety of flight/airport data (i.e. flight status in near real-time, flights in progress tracking, map-based tracking, flight schedules and availability, and airport information). FlightStats’ data covers 99.5% of U.S. flights, and more than 80% of commercial flights worldwide.
More enterprises are paying attention to the business-building potential of open APIs, and it’s not hard to figure out why. When companies like Expedia tell ReadWriteWeb that APIs (check out the Expedia API) contribute about 90 percent of its $2 billion a year, you can bet CFOs and CEOs will take notice.
Our API directory now includes 44 booking APIs. The newest is the WuBook Wired API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Rezgo API. We list 5 Rezgo mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of booking APIs.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that “Big Data” is being reckoned as the next big opportunity in Technology. With the explosion in the number of mobile devices and social networks, the data being generated on a daily basis is mind-boggling and companies are tapping into this data to both understand consumer behaviour and gauge patterns for future products. If you are in Boston this September, the Big Data Innovation conference organization by The IE Group, brings everything under one roof for 2 power packed days that discuss Big Data.
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