There is a restaurant near my house that I go to often, it’s hard to find and I have trouble explaining to my friends how to get there. I can’t help but wonder how much business this restaurant is losing because of its poor location. Indoor mapping company EveryScape might have the solution. It’s like Google Maps street view that doesn’t stop at the front door, it goes right inside. The Everyscape API can seamlessly be integrated into a website, allowing a developer to place the company’s immersive viewer in a relevant section of their site.
Google Maps API has become so entrenched in developer minds, that if you are looking for a mapping feature in your application, you did not look beyond them. But ever since Google announced its pricing last year, websites that have a large number of visitors have been disappointed with the potential fees that they will have to shell out for the services. These websites have responded in typical fashion and they are looking for alternate solutions. This definitely means good news to developers since having competitive choices is a positive thing.
Every day Foursquare users create millions of check-ins using the location-sharing platform. Those may be only a small fraction of the traffic seen by its API, which we’ve estimated receives at least 5 billion requests per month. The company continues to expand the local data made available via its API, so developers of all sorts are finding it a rich resource for building their apps.
Two days ago we wrote about Urban Airship grounding SimpleGeo APIs. While one API was being taken over by another company, it left SimpleGeo’s innovative flagship geo storage product stranded. Another company has quickly come forward to pick up the slack. Geoloqi created a SimpleGeo importer that will move storage from one platform to the other, where places can then be queried by the Geoloqi API.
Push notification startup Urban Airship is closing the doors on all three APIs from the geo infrastructure company it acquired in October. The data behind one of the APIs, SimpleGeo Places, will be maintained by Factual and become part of its Factual API. Other SimpleGeo functionality is being folded into Urban Airship’s platform.
In October Google announced pricing for its popular Google Maps API. Though most sites won’t hit the free limits, those with a lot of traffic may be scrambling for a solution. That was the case for a New York real estate service, which discovered their bill would be $200,000 – $300,000 per year.
The US YellowPages, owned by AT&T, has revamped its developer offerings to launch a robust set of YellowPages APIs. The company also added a modern developer portal, with the ability to track API calls and test queries. The new service is part of a growing trend to share more local data via API. To kick off the new service, AT&T also launched a contest for developers.
Data startup Factual has been one of the most covered product offerings on our site. Over the last couple of years, it has expanded its open data set platform, using location data as its main offering to developers via its Factual Places APIs. The Factual team is on full steam and has just announced a single global API to access place data and added new countries. The company also is making available a rich collection of attributes about each restaurant in its places database.
A year ago users of Garmin’s sport tracking devices logged into its Garmin Connect site to find a seemingly minor change. Instead of embedding Google Maps, the GPS manufacturer had switched to Microsoft’s Bing Maps. According to the 38 pages of comments in Garmin’s forums, this was in actuality a major change. A year later, Garmin responded in October by giving users the option of Bing or Google.
Google Maps API is one of the most popular APIs in our directory. A month back, we reported on Google’s plans to charge for high usage of its Google Maps API. This led to a good amount of confusion among developers on whether they would fall under the category of high usage and if occasional spikes in usage would end up labeling their applications as heavy users. Meanwhile, MapQuest capitalized on the opportunity to declare its maps 100% free.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
