Gowalla’s rocky couple of years ended with a talent acquisition by Facebook of the former location-sharing app. Left in the dust were developers using the Gowalla API, including Ben Dodson and his field notes app for Gowalla. Dodson’s latest creation is a Gowalla-inspired app that focuses just on the gaming elements rather than check-ins. And because Dodson remembers struggling with Gowalla’s early API, the WallaBee API is available from the start. In fact, before the start.
Some tasks in life are so boring that they could never be fun, just don’t tell GreenGoose that. GreenGoose is a real life “gamification” company, using small sensors and accelerometers on stickers to track everyday behavior. The company will eventually sell sensors designed to track anything from how often you drink from a water bottle, to how far you can throw a Frisbee. An online account then uses the data collected from these sensors to calculate how often you perform these tasks. The idea is that this would add some fun to your life while helping you stay on top of chores like feeding your dog. The GreenGoose API allows you to pull data from the sensors into any custom application.
EVE Online, the internet spaceship game that puts all of it’s players into one virtual universe, recently announced plans to license and monetize its EVE Online API. The proposed license would allow developers to make money from apps using the API in return for an annual fee. The details of the new licensing program were released by game developer CCP shortly after it’s annual fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland. EVE’s player community quickly attacked parts of the license, prompting CCP to suspend the changes until later this summer when some of the concerns can be addressed.
Battlefield Bad Company is a first person shooter for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. It keeps an amazing amount of statistics about its players, including a score, levels, a kill count, and many other things. The bfbcs.com site has a good listing of these, in a moderately accessible format. It also offers the Battlefield Bad Company Stats API, so programmers can add this functionality to their applications.
At the The Next Web Hackathon in Amsterdam, developers played with a lot of new APIs. One that caught our attention is the Gbanga Puppetmaster API. Gbanga is a location-aware gaming platform, intended for use with games where walking around within the real world matter. It’s released one game, Gbanga Famiglia, a mobile phone-based app using a theme of mafia families taking over areas and finding loot. Much more exciting, however, is its API, which allows for quests within Famiglia, and other, separate location-based games.
There are a number of advertising networks available for mobile applications, but game company Tap Me is creating one specifically for game developers. Tap Me has launched its iPhone SDK today, with plans to support other platforms soon, including a generic API that will allow developers full control of how advertisements are included in their games. Rather than simply provide display advertising, Tap Me ties the ads into in-game actions, with brands able to be integrated deeper into games.
Mashup games are always fun. Those built upon FourSquare have an extra layer of enjoyment, because they’re tied to the real world. In the case of City Warfare, players use various water weaponry to soak other FourSquare users.
Better hurry–you have passengers to pick up and only a handful of seconds to get them to their destination. TaxiCity takes place on the actual streets of Vancouver. The game was created by students using open data and the Bing Maps API.
There’s no doubt that Wikipedia is a giant store of information. And yes, they have an API, but the data isn’t exactly structured. But that didn’t stop Jim Blackler, who created Quizipedia, a fun game based off of Wikipedia entries.
Normally we’d give a brand new site a break for not immediately having an API. When it comes to the rabidly popular FourSquare, which launched in March, developers have been clamoring to build on top of the service. So, today’s launch of the FourSquare API (our FourSquare API profile) is bound to be met with extreme enthusiasm.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2013. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
