May 12th, 2008

Upcoming Events of Note

The spring conference season is in full swing at the moment and we’re seeing a lot of conference sessions and tracks focused on web APIs, platforms and mashups. Here’s a rundown of these events happening this month and next.

• O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference is this week in Burlingame, CA (tutorials are today, general sessions begin tomorrow). As you can see on the agenda, lots of API and mashup-related sessions. ProgrammableWeb readers can save 15% off registration via discount code whr08pgw.
• Later this week, on Thursday the 15th, over at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale is the SearchMonkey Launch Party. As one of the first components of the Yahoo Operating System, SearchMonkey looks very promising. Party starts at 5:30pm. Be among the first ten readers here who RSVP to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com and mention ProgrammableWeb can get a $50 iTunes gift certificate.
• On May 27-28th at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose, CA, you can see how mashups can provide insight into important social issues as part of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge which culminates at the event (our earlier coverage here). A limited number of seats are still available to the public through May 16th.
• In just over two weeks, on May 28-29th in San Francisco is Google I/O. As we covered last month there are 70+ sessions on dozens of Google API and mashup-related topics.
• For lots more on social APIs from OpenSocial to Facebook, there’s next month’s Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) East, June 9-11th in Washington, DC. Speakers come from all the major players and sessions range from tutorials to advanced programming and monetization strategies. Our sponsor O’Reilly Media is offering 15% off registration by using code gspe08pgw.
• Coming-up on 16-17th of June in New York City will be WidgetWebExpo. Two tracks will cover both the commercial and technical perspectives on widgets. Early bird pricing is in effect until the end of this week.
• Also that same week is eBay’s Developer Conference, June 16-18th in Chicago. Tracks include sessions on programming and best practices using the eBay, PayPal and Shopping.com APIs.

And for more 2008 tech events, see good round-ups from Mashable and Frank Gruber.

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Posted by John Musser as Events at 2:13 AM | 1 Comment »

April 17th, 2008

Google I/O Coming Soon, Free Passes Now

Hardly a week goes by these days without an API or other developer-related announcement from Google. And given that they now have over 35 different APIs as well as whole platforms like Android, Google will be hosting their first multi-day developer event next month in San Francisco: Google I/O, May 28-29. Last year they had a successful, one day global Developer Day, and this year’s event looks to be a whole lot bigger and broader with 70 sessions covering:

• AJAX & JavaScript: AJAX and JavaScript continue to capture the imagination of web developers. These sessions focus on tools and techniques of client-side code, and how to use them to make serious applications quickly and easily.
• APIs & Tools: Development tools for the web are evolving. Product APIs allow integration and extension of web applications. Tools like the Google Web Toolkit™ provide a whole new way to improve performance and compatibility.
• Social: The web is an inherently social place. A new wave of APIs and frameworks, including OpenSocial, are opening up interesting ways to interact with people through applications.
• Mobile: Mobile devices are blurring the lines between handset developers and web developers, opening up interesting opportunities for applications that span multiple platforms. We’ll take a look at how developers can use technologies such as Android™ and Mobile Gears to build applications on the mobile web.
• Maps & Geo: Since the introduction of the Google Maps™ API in 2005, geo and map applications have been one of the most interesting phenomena on the web. These sessions focus on the many aspects of geo applications, from KML to the Google Maps API and more.

Should be a great event and ProgrammableWeb has 10 free passes to give away: be among the first ten to reply in the comments here and receive a free pass to the two-day Google I/O conference in San Francisco (a $400 value). And of course you’re welcome to suggest what sorts of Google based mashups you’d like to see built next: perhaps using Google Calendar, or YouTube, or Google Book Search, or the new Google Visualization tools.

Update: The free passes have all been given away. Thanks for all the fast replies, ideas and comments.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Google at 2:32 AM | 26 Comments »

March 28th, 2008

Mashups in Learning-Focused Organizations

The New Media Consortium (NMC), “an international not-for-profit consortium of nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies,” highlighted data mashups as an important emerging technology in its 2008 Horizon Report. The report estimates that it will take 2 to 3 years (PDF) for mashups to become part of the mainstream for “teaching, learning, or creative applications.”

Following upon the report is the online 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups scheduled for next week, April 1-3. On the program are such talks as “The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup”, “Learning From the Mashup: Are We Blending Our Future, or Throwing Our Future in the Blender?”, “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist”, and “Information Visualization Using Mashups and Web 2.0 Tools”.

Might the NMC report and symposium be a sign that mashups are finally being embraced by forward-looking learning-focused organizations? In the meantime, check out the 4 education-related APIs and 36 “education” tagged mashups already in ProgrammableWeb.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Events, Gov at 1:04 AM | 2 Comments »

March 6th, 2008

Mashup Camp Set Free

Given the number of very interesting topics to discuss in this space it’s timely that Mashup Camp, now in it’s sixth run, is just around the corner in two weeks. And once again it’s free. Here are the details:

• When: March 17-20th
• Where: Mountain View, CA, at the Computer History Museum where the first camp took place two years ago.
• Cost: Free. Just like the first Camp, registration to Mashup Camp 6 is free. Also free is the food (breakfast and lunch) as well as the entertainment.
• Who: As you can see on the initial Who’s Coming list it’s a diverse group including mashup developers (independent and enterprise), analysts, VCs, tool providers, and the people actually building the APIs at places like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft.
• How and What: Follows an unconference format that allows the attendees to define the agenda and lead the discussions which results in a high signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion topics range from the technical to business strategy (see the first Camp wiki for examples). The first two days are the Mashup University and the second two are the unconference. Raymond Yee, a lecturer at University of California Berkeley and author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups, will teach the Introduction to Mashups class.
• Extra feature: The always popular Best Mashup Contest where developers can win a 17″ MacBook Pro. At past Camps the competition has lead to some notable winning mashups like WeatherBonk (which has since been acquired by the Weather Channel), The Hype Machine (our profile), and PodBop (shown below, our profile).

You can see more of our coverage of past Mashup Camps here.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Events at 11:40 AM | No Comments »

February 28th, 2008

Microsoft’s Flurry of API News for MIX08

Microsoft made a flurry of API-related announcements today in advance of next week’s sold-out MIX08 event in Las Vegas. The key details are outlined in this blog post at dev.live from David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Platform Services. Today’s news covers five of their Live APIs, development tool support for web APIs, and a bit of insight into their overall technology strategy for the Live family of APIs (they currently have over 20 APIs). Over the past couple of years Microsoft has increasingly been using MIX as a launching ground for their online platform technologies (see our MIX07 coverage here).

• AtomPub: Perhaps most notable overall is the official statement that “Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023).”. They’re starting with the Windows Live Spaces Photo API, their Application-Based Storage service, the Astoria ADO.Net Data Services, with “a few more surprises in this area announced at MIX”. Since Google’s GData is also Atom-based, this means two of the biggest web API providers are both supporting the same underlying REST-based model in their web services. Of course the devils in the details and over time we’ll see how the implementations will inevitably vary across vendors.
• Windows Live Messenger Library (WLML): The next biggest part of the announcement is this new JavaScript API built on top of the Windows Live Messenger platform (and their 300 million+ users) that allows web sites to create their own customized chat experience. You can get details on the API in our new API summary and on the MSDN site.The screenshot below shows a custom app on the right interacting with the standard Messenger on the left. The API supports all of the core Messenger features like text chat, user status, pictures and contact list management. It’s a secure model where sign-on is done through Windows Live ID so the site hosting the application should never have access to the user’s password. The library is compatible with IE and Firefox on Windows and Mac. What about usage limits? It’s free up to 1 million unique users per month. Note that this is a different, more powerful interface into Messenger than their existing Windows Live IM Control.



• Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication: This updated API and new web control give third-party applications a secure way access users Windows Live data while giving users granular permission of what can be accessed and for how long (see API our Live ID profile here). In order to use the service developers must first sign-up for an Application ID. They then supply this at runtime when a user wants to access their Live data (the process of “requesting consent”). At that point users are sent to a Windows Live login page or iframe where they login and grant access based on function and/or time. This gives the app a “Consent Token” which in turn contains a “Delegation Token” which can be used by the app to access specific Live APIs and functions. These tokens expire and need to be refreshed by the application. This will be an important API in the Live platform stack given how many other services will leverage it. The slide below shows the interaction between this services and an app using the Photo API.



• Windows Live Photo API: In a major upgrade to their Windows Live Spaces Photo API. The API lets third-party sites build photo applications on top of Windows Live Spaces. Because of the large size of the Live Spaces user base, the API gives developers programmatic access to 4 billion photos. Underneath the covers the API now supports both a WebDAV and an AtomPub model. The APIs let you upload, download and delete photos and to create, edit, and delete albums. One of the changes to the API and photo hosting model is that third-party developers don’t need to host or proxy the images but instead can manage the photo metadata but leave the storage and serving to Microsoft. And note that it uses Windows Live Delegated Authentication in which users delegate permission to read or read/write photos on a site-by-site basis.
• Application Based Storage API: Details on this will be released at MIX next week but this is “an experimental API which allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user. This API has an AtomPub service end point so developers will be able to call this using ADO.NET data services or other AtomPub compatible tools. The real value kicks in here if an application was to have hundreds of thousands of users as the storage is offloaded to Windows Live infrastructure.”
• Last but not least are updates to Silverlight Streaming including WebDAV support as well as new code samples at mslivelabs to help developers get started including an update to their existing Tafiti app (our PW mashup profile) along with source.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Microsoft at 12:01 PM | 8 Comments »

February 4th, 2008

Upcoming Events and Conferences

In the next two months there are a number of notable conferences and events that should be of interest to folks in this space. As platforms and APIs become continue to grow we’re seeing more conferences dedicated to them (like Mashup Camp and Graphing Social Patterns) or industry-specific events with API and mashup-related sessions and tracks (like VON and eComm2008).

• At the end of this month is the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Miami for three days starting on the 28th. Checking the schedule you can see the lineup includes a number of platform-related talks including Google’s Kevin Marks on the Future of APIs and Leah Culver on the Future of Web Services. The workshops also look interesting including one on OpenSocial from Plaxo’s Joesph Smarr. ProgrammableWeb readers can get 15% off the price of either a one-day or conference and workshop ticket using the code ‘PWEBM08′.
• A pair of popular O’Reilly conferences are happening in San Diego the first week of March: Graphing Social Patterns West (aka GSP West) and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. GSP West has two days worth of interesting speakers and tracks that cover both the business side and technology sides of social network platforms. In parallel is ETech, with one of the most diverse agendas of any tech conference with topics ranging from using web services to build databases in the cloud, to genomics hacking, to DIY survival, to iPhone hacking. O’Reilly Media is a PW sponsor and readers can save 20% off ETech registration using discount code et08pgw and save 30% off Graphing Social Patterns with code gspw08pgw.
• Microsoft describes its MIX08 Conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas on March 5-7 as “an intimate conversation between developers, designers and business professionals.” The event focuses on their leading-edge technologies and for mashup developers there’s lots of relevant content including sessions on Windows Live Services, Mashups, Virtual Earth, and Silverlight 2.0. Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer are scheduled to speak, and there is a contest for best WPF/Expression blend-built mash-up.
• Mashup Camp 6: March 17-20, Mountain View, CA. The latest installment of the mashup community’s leading event will feature the same open format as well as the popular speed geeking and mashup contests. This one’s back at the Computer History Museum, a great venue for this event. The two day unconference portion of the event will be preceded by the two day Mashup University with how-to sessions for developers. You can see our earlier coverage of past Mashup Camps here.
• VON.x: March 17-20, San Jose. The largest IP communications event is now in its tenth year. As you can see on our PW dashboard for Telephony APIs there’s a lot happening in this market. Thomas Howe, who helped us create and run this vertical for us will be holding a pre-conference executive summit, Communications Enabled Business Processes, focusing on how to extend and improve business processes using voice APIs and mashups. And part the event this year is the unconference VONcamp where you can help define the agenda.
• Another worthwhile communications event with deep API and mashup content is eComm2008: Emerging Communications Conference, happening March 12-14th in Mountain View. The theme is that VOIP and telephony becomes much more interesting when it’s combined with other “vectors” like open source, social networking, p2p and mashups. As you can see from the schedule, there are presentations from API platform providers including Skype, Google, Twitter, BT, LignUp, and Yahoo on their new Fire Eagle service.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Facebook, Social, Telephony at 4:20 AM | No Comments »

January 30th, 2008

5 Demo 2008 APIs

This year’s Demo conference is going on in Palm Desert, CA this week, and although many of the companies are early-stage startups just getting their main product ready for the public, here are 5 that use, or plan to use, APIs for a strategic advantage.

• Ribbit’s new Amphibian product for managing voicemail through an internet interface (covered by Tom Forenski here) is based on Adobe Flex and AIR technology and has 2500 developers signed up working on interesting extensions such as an iPhone on the desktop. Their API is already out there and you can learn more on our Ribbit API profile and our Telephony API Dashboard.
• blist is an easy-to-use tool for creating and managing databases online doesn’t yet publicly have an API, but TechCrunch reported that it will provide one. For more, see this glowing review from Webware’s Rafe Needleman.
• Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network product offers an internet storage file system optimized to scale for large media files, and accessed through both SOAP and REST web services (and see 10 more storage APIs here).
• Cozimo is designed for real-time collaboration and review of videos and images, targeted at the creative community, and has a non-public API available for integration into other workflows.
• And finally Seesmic, Loic Le Meur’s highly anticipated “video Twitter” product, is in closed beta and has no developer’s API released (Marshall Kirkpatrick comments on its and others use of the XMPP protocol), but the developer community is so interested that an unofficial developer’s blog was started to share information about the developments, and the official developer’s blog followed shortly thereafter. You can track the status of the API at our new Seesmic API Profile.

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Posted by John Musser as Books, Events at 12:59 AM | No Comments »

January 3rd, 2008

Q1 Events: Enterprise Mashups and Money

Now that 2008 is here, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the upcoming conferences of note in the web platform and mashup world. The first two events are happening in just a few weeks: both are business-centric, one focused on enterprise mashups and the other looking at what happens when Web 2.0 meets Wall Street:

Open Enterprise 2.0 Mashups: Expanding Customer Value Networks: February 1, New York City. This is an east coast edition to last fall’s Silicon Valley event. The agenda covers a wide variety of enterprise mashup topics including strategy, tools, and APIs. The one-day lineup includes speakers from Google, Jackbe, Kapow Technologies, Mashery, Nexaweb and the University of Southern California (see the full agenda here). ProgrammableWeb readers can use this registration page to get a 40% discount until January 14th.

Money:Tech Conference: Feb 6-7, New York City. This new conference from O’Reilly looks at how the current generation of Web 2.0 technologies and ideas are impacting Wall Street today and where they might be headed in the future. It’s a very interesting schedule. Financial services companies are huge consumers and developers of web services and we’ll certainly start seeing more platform strategies at work here soon. For example, the session description for Data Demos notes that: “The stock market is the ultimate mash-up. It combines information from all sources – news, capital markets, human behavior, geography, etc. – to come up with liquid stocks and profits. Where are the best ideas coming from in mashing up data with stocks? We’ll showcase some of the best mashups out there, ranging from Ebay listings, to stock wikis, and on and on.” ProgrammableWeb readers can use the code “mt08pwb” to get 20% off registration.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Events, Money at 12:59 AM | No Comments »

October 30th, 2007

28 European APIs, Mashup the Continent

Out of the over 500 APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb, how many are offered by companies based in Europe? With MashupCamp Dublin in a couple weeks, this seems like a good question. In taking a look at the directory there are at least 28 European APIs (that is, companies headquartered or founded in Europe, even though they now be part of a larger, non-European company, like Skype). These APIs come from a variety of countries including the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Spain, and Russia.

• 23: Photo sharing service. API is Flickr compatible. European team.
• AMEE: Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine. CO2 caclulations. UK.
• AQL: Bulk SMS messaging services. UK.
• Betfair: Online betting exchange. UK.
• BT: Variety of APIs for messaging and voice. UK.
• Clickatell: SMS messaging services. UK.
• eCourier: Delivery services and package tracking. UK.
• Esendex: Business SMS messaging services. UK.
• ImageLoop: Animated slideshow service. Germany.
• iShareMaps: UK postcode geocoder. UK
• Jaiku: Micro-blogging service. Now part of Google. Finland.
• Joost: Online television and video service. Luxembourg.
• Lokad: Online time series forecasting tools. France.
• Multimap: Global online mapping service. UK.
• Nearby.org.uk: Geocoding service. UK.
• Nestoria: UK and Spain real estate listings. UK.
• Netvibes: Personalized home page and widgets. France.
• OddsMiner: Sports betting XML feeds. UK.
• Panoramio: Geo-centric photo service, now owned by Google. Spain.
• Pikeo: Photo sharing service. France.
• Pingdom: Web site monitoring services. Sweden.
• Skype: Messaging platform. Luxembourg.
• Talis: Library 2.0 reference services. UK.
• TheyWorkForYou: Track the UK Parliament. UK.
• TradeSports: Online sports betting exchange. Ireland.
• ViaMichelin: Mapping, directions, and travel booking services. France.
• Vodafone Betavine: Mobile web services. UK.
• Yandex: Russian search engine. Russia.

If anyone is aware of European APIs in our directory but not included above or other non-US APIs we don’t currently catalog please let us know in the comments or with our share an API page.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Events at 8:04 PM | 3 Comments »

October 16th, 2007

Successful Developer Programs

There were a number of interesting sessions at yesterday’s Business of APIs Conference hosted by Mashery. Dave McClure, who previously oversaw the launch of the PayPal developer network, gave an engaging, to-the-point talk entitled “Successful Developer Programs”. If you’re running an API developer network or even thinking of running one, here’s a summary of good ideas and important questions to ask yourself:

Read the rest of “Successful Developer Programs” »

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Posted by John Musser as BestPractices, Events, Featured, Money, Popular at 7:17 PM | 1 Comment »