Where were you when Hurricane Sandy hit, and what were you doing? If you’re like many other ProgrammableWeb readers, you weren’t watching news reports on TV–you were using social media to keep tabs on your friends and family, and taking advantage of the vast amounts of data available on the Internet to make sense of the situation. Below, a round-up of how Twitter and other online resources helped people get through the record-breaking “super storm.”
While just about everybody would agree that the “Internet of Things” within the context of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications is one of the next big things on the Web, turning that vision into reality has been problematic because of the lack of standards.
Businesses are using a voice over Internet service to address a common problem: The gap between online users and customer care centers. A 2011 TeaLeaf survey found the abandonment rate for online shoppers reaches 41 percent when these customers encounter a problem. One way companies are addressing the problem is by integrating VoIP APIs within their websites so customers can click-to-call for help, according to a SureVoIP blog post.
For the past few years there has been a sharp rise in self-employed workers as well as workers who perform the majority of their duties from home. Many companies have workers scattered across the globe, making efficient online communication and collaboration an absolute necessity. This post highlights several feature packed and versatile online project management and collaboration platforms.
California-based Zurb is turning the dry science of usability on its head by using Twitter and Facebook APIs to socialize user testing.
User testing has long been the domain of usability experts who utilize carefully controlled focus groups, panels and one-on-one interviews to assess software and websites. Zurb’s suite of socially connected testing products let anyone quickly and easily create a test and gather insights from Twitter followers and Facebook friends.
There’s a difference between knowing and hoping your API can handle any traffic you send to it. The premise behind the new performance testing service Cloud Assault is that testing scale should be part of development. The service has the Cloud Assault API to enable coders to do just that.
High traffic, content-rich sites want to slice their analytics in different ways than, say, an e-commerce site. That’s the concept behind Parse.ly Dash, a new product to provide “fresh insights” to these publishers with a price tag starting at $499 per month. Interestingly, the company’s three pricing tiers each come with another level of API access. Despite the beautiful graphs provided by Dash, it’s clear that sometimes getting at insights programmatically is preferred.
Facebook is apparently in talks with music video site Vevo to take over streaming of the videos from YouTube once the contract runs out. That would take the company’s more than 30,000 videos out of the YouTube API. In another story, AppFog has expanded its platform-as-a-service offering to include database and email from within your apps. That and 11 new APIs rounds out today in APIs.
Heroku is at the end of its first full year as part of Salesforce.com. During that year, the number of applications running on the platform has grown eight fold to over 800,000. Byron Sebastian, Heroku’s CEO, said that much of this growth has come from an increasing presence of enterprise customers, many of whom are new to the API-driven Platform-as-a-Service offering that Heroku offers.
Email continues to be a critical part of most web applications today. Despite the rise of various methods of reaching out to users, transactional email continues to grow. Many developers prefer to offload the email functionality of their application to a service which does the heavy lifting of not just delivering your email but also provides tracking and other various other services. PostageApp, a provider of Email Management Services, has just announced a new version of its product that includes a new delivery engine, analytics and new plans.
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