February 23rd, 2008

Thanks to Our Sponsors

We couldn’t keep making ProgrammableWeb the resource it is without the help of our sponsors and partners. A big thanks for their support.

• Mashery: Launching and running a successful API is harder than it looks and Mashery’s on-demand API services can help you get there more quickly, with lower costs and better results. See what shopping.com, Compete, Reuters and LinkedIn already know.
• OpenKapow: The online mashup builder community that lets you make mashups from any site, with or without an API. Built using their enterprise grade Kapow Mashup Server.
• StrikeIron: Offers 100+ commercial APIs via their Data as a Service platform. Win a 50″ HD flat screen TV by using their API for NCAA basketball data from The Sports Network to create the winning mashup in their new Mashup Madness Contest.
• BT: Mashup the phone network with BT’s Web21C SDK industry leading platform. BT offers six sets of APIs including voice, SMS messaging, and conference calling.
• Xignite: Xignite (pronounced “x-Ignite”) provides financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications, offering over 50 commercial APIs covering market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, and statistics.
• Lat49: Got maps? Then get paid using Lat49’s online mapvertising system that brings geographically relevant advertising to users of online maps. Publishers get new monetization options and advertisers can leverage dynamically served ads on maps from the major map providers.
• Bungee Labs: The Bungee Connect application platform is a single environment for the development, testing, deployment and hosting of amazing web applications. Use this scalable on-demand platform to build highly interactive user web applications faster and more cost effectively.
• O’Reilly Media: Two great O’Reilly conferences are coming-up in San Diego March 3-6 ETech and Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) West. GSP West will have a an AppNite Live Demo Contest with 10 prizes. ProgrammableWeb readers can save 30% off GSP using registration code gspw08pgw and save 20% at ETech with code et08pgw.
• Adobe: Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills to build and deploy engaging web applications on the desktop with support for building Ajax, Flex and Flash.
• eBay: Developers are using the eBay APIs to create innovative applications and in two weeks eBay will announce up to five grand prize $10,000 winners who built the coolest Adobe Flash widgets for the eBay Affiliate Community using Flash or Flex.
• Userplane: Provider of communication software for online communities, Userplane offers open APIs for their full suite of services from chat to messaging. Use Userplane Money to start for free and rev-share the ad income.

If you are interested in sponsoring ProgrammableWeb please contact us for details.

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October 29th, 2006

Thanks to our Sponsors

Just a short note of big thanks to our Programmable Web sponsors:

• Clickatell: The world’s leading provider of large scale SMS messaging services offers reliable coverage to 578 networks in 192 countries worldwide. Use their APIs and join over 22,000 satisfied customers including FedEx, Motorola, Fujitsu, and Heinekin.
• ClearForest: The new ClearForest Semantic Web Services API gives you access to their sophisticated natural language processing tools. This is a proven toolset based on ten years of helping companies get meaning from unstructured data. You can win up to $2,000 by creating the winning entry in their SWS Mashup Contest.
• adaptiveblue: Creator of BlueOrganizer — a very useful Firefox extension that helps “make your browser smarter” (by among other things making use of APIs listed here). At last month’s DEMOfall event BlueOrganizer received great reviews.
• BT: Our inaugural sponsor. This summer BT created an innovative developer recruiting campaign using APIs and mashups as the means to find creative, talented programmers. And as a matter of fact, one of the entries, Locale, the Random Day Out Generator, was just listed here today.

As API providers, consumers, and supporters, these companies are closely aligned with the mission of this site and thanks to their support we’re able to grow Programmable Web along with the mashup ecosystem (starting with the number of mashups published here each day — which have doubled over the past few weeks).

If you are interested in sponsoring ProgrammableWeb you can get details on our our sponsorship page.

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September 26th, 2006

Books for Amazon Mashups

Continuing the series on books for mashup developers — last week Flickr Mashup Books — here is a quick summary of books that can help you build mashups with the various Amazon APIs.

Note that the Amazon APIs are quite popular with 94 Amazon e-commerce API mashups listed at ProgrammableWeb. And you can use the Other Amazon APIs link on the left navigation of that page to see the 10 other Amazon APIs.

• The Web Developer’s Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service: Developing Web Applications Using Amazon Web Services And PHP: by Jason Levitt. Published in May 2005 with good coverage of their core e-commerce API with code focused on using PHP 4 and 5.
• Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds: by Paul Reinheimer. Just published this summer it covers Amazon plus a variety of other APIs (as you can tell from the long title). Has a good practical feel and the inclusion of web feed programming is key since that’s such a central piece of so many mashups. Being new it covers the latest versions of the APIs, which isn’t true for some of the other titles (see below).
• Amazon.com Mashups (Wrox): Due in January from experienced mashup developer Francis Shanahan, creator of Zuggest and the cool Zollage. Looks like it will most of the key elements of Amazon’s ecommerce API and their S3 API and combining those with other web services out there.
• There are a couple of other Amazon API-related books but are older and do not use examples from the latest API version: Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API by John Paul Mueller, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson, Amazon Hacks by Paul Bausch as part of the good O’Reilly Hacks series.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Books, General, HowTo at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

August 25th, 2006

Tools for Google Maps

Mike Pegg does a great job tracking the most interesting maps mashups over at his Google Maps Mania. Occasionally he also does a roundup of tools for creating or enhancing Google Maps. Follow this link to see his eighth roundup of these tools along with links to the previous seven roundups. Good mix of Google Maps-focused tools.

ProgrammableWeb has a popular howto page that covers resources for a variety of APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as General, Google, HowTo, Mapping, Tools at 12:05 AM | 8 Comments »

December 31st, 2005

2005 Year End Stats

ProgrammableWeb’s 2005 year-end ’stats’: 137 APIs & 275 mashups.

This time next year? We’ll see, but somehow suspect by then this year’s numbers will look tiny by comparison…

Happy New Year to all!

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November 30th, 2005

Evslin on Bubble 2.0 and APIs

Tom Evslin, in a typically thoughtful pair of posts, Bubble 2.0 – It’s The APIs and Bubble 2.0 – Why Not APIs?, addressed the topic of APIs. Beginning with a concise historical background he covers the strategy behind providing APIs and answers the question, why would a provider not want to build an API? A: time, commitment, market protectionism, abuse prevention and security risks. But argues these issues should not dissuade companies from providing APIs:

“Becoming a platform will be the road to fame and glory - not to mention riches - for many Web 2.0 services. Success will be determined by the usefulness of the underlying service and how attractive it is to third party developers and to other services. And, of course, how well it is marketed to developers.”

Recommended reading. (I first subscribed to Tom’s blog after running across his amusing and useful 4 part series Managing Programmers for CEOs and the matching Managing CEOs for Programmers.)

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November 6th, 2005

Misc New Links

Below are a sampling of some of the other, non-mashup link contributions folks have made recently.

• Andrew Bidochko added a link to Map Builder where you use a web form to build your own Google Map without any coding. Quite slick.
• Send a fax from PHP using this new example from Interfax. You can send a binary file such as a Microsoft Word or Acrobat PDF document to any fax number.
• How to create KML using this snippet of VB.net code showing exactly how to parse, save and launch a .KML file (fly to with Google Earth). [via Tim Hibbard of Where’s Tim Hibbard fame]
• An anonymous poster added a link to the Webjay.org developer’s mailing list on Yahoo Groups.
• Book Burro: A handy Firefox extension for comparing book prices.

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October 27th, 2005

1000 Flowers Bloom Podcasts

Chris Law, creator of the wsfinder wiki and blog, has just started a very interesting new blog, 1000 Flowers Bloom, subtitled ‘Silicon Valley is fertile ground’. He’s starting with a series of podcast interviews, the first with Toni Schneider, Yahoo!’s VP of Developer Relations discussing their API strategy and the latest interview with Microsoft’s Chief Blogging Officer, Robert Scoble. Good interviews with real substance. Nice transcript snippets on the site. Definitely worth listening to.

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September 23rd, 2005

Urban Dictionary

Two API additions today:

• Urban Dictionary: an API for when you’re curious about what frontin, party foul, low pro po, and tool really mean.
• AmphetaRate: a news feed aggregation service.

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September 16th, 2005

Web API Sites, Unite

Chris Law who last week started the wsfinder wiki, blog and very interesting Map of the Web 2.0 World has suggested that it might make sense to join forces, along with the new Web API Tracker blog, “give the community one definitive place to go” for Web API resources. I completely agree. Given the degree of interest (see below for evidence) I think that by working jointly we can do more, and do it more cohesively, than we could on our own. Funny how in just a few weeks there went from being no centralized resources on the topic to at least three.

(Speaking of interest in the topic, in just the last two weeks at ProgrammableWeb here’s some of what’s happened: starting Labor Day weekend traffic skyrocketed (as noted earlier); number of Google links to “ProgrammableWeb” went from less than 10 to about 36,000; there’s a few hundred blog subscribers; almost 1,000 del.cio.us bookmarks; and the site got some very nice comments from folks like Chad Dickerson and Richard MacManus as well as an O’Reilly Radar pickup . Surprised the heck out of me.)

Now that there’s a few of us working on this topic it should be all the better by building a wider community.

Chris, I’ll buy the next round ;-)

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Posted by John Musser as General at 6:28 AM | 2 Comments »