There is the old hat of publishing giants struggling to find viable business models in the digital world. Then there are countries and legislations that are even trying to turn the very principles of the internet upside down, by making the creation of links an act that one should pay for. On the other end of the spectrum there are newspapers that have public APIs to their content. These newspapers are striving for innovation, by exploring new grounds, instead of sticking to what they know.
We have all heard it before: “Just print it, sign it, and fax it over.” That saying that brings visions of typewriters to mind. It’s one step ahead of vacuum tube document transfer, but without that cool wooshing effect. It is slightly better when you can print the form, fill it out in hard copy, and then scan it back in so it can be emailed; This is still a little silly. Agree’nSign hopes to do its part to eliminate the step into the physical world of hard copy by facilitating legally binding and defensible electronic signatures. The Agree’nSign API makes it possible to integrate this function into existing applications.
Box.Net is on a mission to increase adoption of its file storage service with consumers. After successful adoption of its service with enterprise customers, it is clearly determined to woo mobile device owners by providing them with large amounts of free space (50GB!). To make it easier, it is partnering with device manufacturers like LG to provide the free space seamlessly via the Box.net API.
Online file storage services have not just seen huge adoption, but providers of such services have been innovating constantly to attract more developers. Combine this with the fact that traditional enterprise software vendors are not fast enough to respond to the changing dynamics in enterprise software. All this makes for a good opportunity for one of the vendors to step in and pave the path to drive innovation. Box.Net is on mission to provide exactly that with its Box.net API. It hopes that its new developer community and $2 million integration fund will help.
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.
When launching and managing your API, many companies choose to do all the work themselves, unaware that are service providers available to help you plan, deploy, launch and manage your API infrastructure and ecosystem. To help bring awareness, I wanted to take a few moments and do a roundup of API service providers.
Millions of small businesses use QuickBooks for accounting and invoicing, but for many a view of customer data ends there. A partnership between QuickBooks maker Intuit and enterprise software-as-a-service company Salesforce looks to bring more insights to small business customers. To connect the seemingly disparate worlds in which the companies operate, they’re using their APIs, namely the Intuit Data Service API.
For at least thirty years, people have talked about the “paperless office.” With cloud-based services, it may finally be possible. Yet, for many organizations, a major hang-up is contracts, which require ink signatures. In our first public API report, sponsored by DocuSign, we looked at electronic signature platforms. Specifically, we examined the features and developer friendliness of e-signature APIs, which allow non-ink signatures to be automated and integrated into business processes. Without a doubt, e-signatures are a growing field, as evidenced by the recent acquisition of EchoSign by Adobe.
Cashboard appears to be a full featured and mature time-tracking and invoicing system. It’s been about 9 months since the company opened its system up with its Cashboard API in beta, which continues to this day. The customer testimonials are quite persuasive and could lead to removing that manual Excel spreadsheet approach from the equation. After all, we’re much more web savvy, right?
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.
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