Cross platform Development Tools have been steadily gaining adoption among developers. Geoloqi, a platform for location-based services has tapped into one such platform, Appcelerator to provide a powerful location services component that aims to make life easier for developers who have adopted Appcelerator and are planning to provide location awareness in their applications.
WorldMate, the world’s largest mobile itinerary management and booking service, launched the WorldMate API this week. The e-mail parsing API extracts travel data (e.g. confirmation e-mails, key travel information, airport codes, etc.) and sends the information back to the developer’s platform. Providing such information opens WorldMate’s data to a new realm of applications. WorldMate has already seen adoption from developers outside the itinerary management and booking space. Early examples include expense reporting, flight status, and compliance apps. WorldMate CEO, Jean Tripier, commented: “We are overwhelmed with the immediate popularity of the API across a wide spectrum of developers.”
With respect to Web APIs, the industry has clearly and emphatically landed on REST as the standard way to implement these services. And for good reason… REST, which is generally implemented as a one-size-fits-all solution, is an excellent choice for a most companies who wish to expose their content to third parties, mobile app developers, partners, internal teams, etc. There are many tomes about what REST is and how best to implement it, so I won’t go into detail here. But if I were to sum up the value proposition to these companies of the traditional REST solution, I would describe it as:
Factual Inc, a company founded by ex-Googler Gil Elbaz that is creating a collaborative data platform, announced extensions to its Factual APIs today that are aimed at improving the ability to target advertising and provide other geo-based capabilities in mobile applications. The three new APIs, Geopulse, Reverse Geocoder, and World Geographies, fill gaps and extend the scope of Factual’s API portfolio. But the way that Factual thinks about its APIs also holds lessons for anyone who is mapping out an API strategy of their own.
Wishpot typically brings “lists” to mind. With Wishpot’s original service, users could create a single wish list from multiple sites. The service eliminated the need for a new list for every site in which a shopper was interested. Wishpot has now expanded the wish list experience into a full shopping experience with a new API framework that provides true social commerce (shopping/browsing through checkout from the same platform).
Appcelerator, a leading cross-platform development tools company has announced the release of its flagship product, Titanium 2.0 that provides developers with a single platform to develop native, hybrid and mobile web applications along with the release of the Appcelerator Cloud Services, that makes it dead simple for mobile applications to integrate cloud services into their applications.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new acquisition. The team behind Instagram will now be part of Facebook. The most compelling piece of Zuckerberg’s post declares that Instagram will remain an independent product, which is good news for the Instagram API.
The push notification and in app purchase enabler, Urban Airship, has added a long-expected feature to its Urban Airship API. Users can now segment audiences by location using technology Urban Airship acquired from SimpleGeo.
The company that turned away from 2 million users to focus on developers has announced a new way to integrate with its TokBox OpenTok API. The video chat platform is now available on iOS to create face-to-face applications. Using the new SDK, developers can integrate video chat into any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad app.
It wasn’t that long ago, just late last year, that I started wondering if CloudMine was trying to replace me. Just a few months pass, and it seems my fears were not unfounded.
If you’re not familiar with what the CloudMine API offers, it’s backend-as-a-service, with the core feature being easy storage and access of user – and global – data. All that’s required to store JSON data in the global scope is an HTTP call with the application’s credentials. Storing user data in a private scope only requires the addition of the user’s credentials.
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