Nokia, with new devices like the Nokia N97 making gadget blog headlines and the opening of the Ovi Store last month, is in the midst of a big push to expand and open its platform to web developers of all stripes. The $250,000 prize money offered in the Calling All Innovators Contest is one of the largest prizes for developers that we’ve seen, along with a hefty $30K in prizes for the Apps on Maps Contest. And finally, a new Ovi Maps API offers rich 2D and 3D views, optimized for mobile as well as website applications.
While social networking sites already help users maintain connections with friends and interest groups, a recent trend in web services has been the growth of semantic technologies that connect people across different websites. New York startup AdaptiveBlue offer a service called “Glue,” which uses semantic web techniques to understand the content of popular web pages that describe lifestyle objects such as books, music, and movies. It then lets you do many useful, in-context things based on that data, such as learn more about the movie or actors on IMDB, buy the soundtrack on Amazon, read the historical background on Wikipedia, and a interact with a variety of other sites and services.
The much-anticipated US government catalog of government agency web sites who offer structured data, Data.gov, has gone live. Here’s how they describe their site and their mission:
Gnomedex, the annual tech conference in Seattle hosted by Chris Pirillo, and Microsoft Live Search, are teaming up to sponsor a developer’s contest dubbed “Will Code for Green” where judges will accept mashup entries in two categories: Economy and Ecology.
As we previously reported in December 2008, the Apps for America contest was created to encourage the development of open source applications that help constituents monitor and communicate with their members of Congress. Contest entries have to use at least one of the required APIs, which included the Sunlight Labs API , OpenSecrets.org API, FollowTheMoney.org API, and Capitol Words API.
The tagline of the Times Open blog is “All the news that’s fit to printf()”, and that clever play on the paper’s motto gains more credence with each new API released. In February the Times introduced the Newswire API, which “provides an up-to-the-minute stream of published items” from the paper of record, and the New York State Legislature API for tracking the political maneuverings in Albany.
Mashup software provider JackBe has issued a challenge for folks to come up with a user-friendly (read: non-techie) definition of the term enterprise mashup. Although you won’t necessarily earn much money (a $50 Amazon gift card), you will earn the honorary title: Mashup CEO.
In a well-received move, major British newspaper The Guardian has opened up access to its content and data sets to third parties. The Guardian’s Open Platform comprises both an API (our new Guardian API Profile) and a Data Store that provide access to multimedia content and data sets respectively. The Content API includes approximately 1,000,000 articles that go as far back as 1999 and in some cases much further back.
Social Actions takes actions posted on the web from more than forty different socially progressive organizations, and aggregates them into a common format for easy discovery. The actions are concrete activities like volunteering, donating, signing a petition, making a loan, or attending a meetup, all in the service of “making a difference” for issues like Darfur, cancer, LGBT, prison reform, and other activist concerns. On the Social Actions site interested citizens can search the opportunities, and an API (our Social Actions API profile) allows developers to build on top of the stream of postings.
If you like online games and you like programming, the growing number of games with open APIs is a boon. We now over 20 games-related APIs in our directory. The latest entry is for the new API for Spore, the Electronic Arts Maxis game where players can create their own creatures. The API provides developers with the capability to create mashups and applications that access the Spore database of user creations and information about the creators themselves (see our new Spore API profile for details).
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