April 24th, 2008

25 Finance APIs

Among the 25 finance-related APIs now listed on ProgrammableWeb, there are services from old and new companies, and large and small companies. For example, the venerable Dun and Bradstreet offers the Dun and Bradstreet Credit Check API, personal finance startup Wesabe offers an API and there’s an API from Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending service. Overall, most current business and finance APIs fall into one of two categories: APIs from SaaS-based business administration and management services, and APIs that provide financial markets data.

SaaS Business Administration APIs

A variety of new on-demand service providers offer APIs as a means to reach and integrate with their services. For example, the Blinksale API accesses their online invoicing service. The REST API provides access to your Blinksale data, letting you create invoices using a Blinksale invoice template or one of your own creation.

The FreshBooks API provides online invoicing and time tracking using your Freshbooks account. The KashFlow and NetAccounts APIs offer broader accounting capabilities, geared toward businesses in the UK and Australia, respectively.

Financial Data APIs

Looking for real-time financial market quotes or historical data? Fifteen APIs are ready to get you the data you need, when you need it. Xignite provides financial data APIs ranging from XigniteRealtime and XigniteFunds (real-time U.S. stock market quotes, and U.S. mutual fund data) to XigniteCurrencies and XigniteRates (currency and international interest rate data) to XigniteEdgar and XigniteCalendar (U.S. SEC Edgar filings and global economic calendars). The Xignite APIs feature SOAP and REST protocols, with all data returned in XML format. Once you’ve used one Xignite API, it’s relatively easy to get started with others, since all the APIs incorporate a common design structure.

StrikeIron offers a number of APIs that serve users with U.S. financial data including StrikeIron Stock Quotes Basic, StrikeIron Mutual Funds, and StrikeIron Historical Stock Quotes. The StrikeIron APIs utilize SOAP protocol and return results in XML format.

Timepost Mashup

Business and Financial APIs provide excellent opportunities for developing mashups. One example is the Timepost mashup, which applies the Blinksale and FreshBooks business APIs, along with the popular Basecamp API (from 37signals) and the Harvest time-tracking API. Integration of these APIs results in a rich time tracking and project collaboration solution for small businesses.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Money at 4:07 AM | 4 Comments »

April 15th, 2008

Connecting Money and Politics: MAPLight.org

Just in time for the next election season, the team at MAPLight.org offer the MAPLight.org API which enables developers to “illuminate the connection” between money and politics by providing detailed funding information for candidates for political office. It’s a growing data set and currently MAPLight covers candidates for the U.S. Congress, presidential elections, and the California Legislature.

The API is constructed using standard REST protocol with data results returned in XML format. In order to use the API, you need to know a candidate’s Federal Elections Commission (FEC) ID. MAPLight provides a link to a tool for looking up FEC IDs on its API home page.

For example, the FEC IDs for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama are P00003392, P80002801, and P80003338, respectively. Given the FEC ID’s, you can easily obtain today’s campaign contribution information for each candidate, using this request:

http://data.maplight.org/map_fec/financial-summaries.xml
?ids=P00003392,P80002801,P80003338

Here’s an example from our mashup listing of their lookup widget:

The MAPLight API is part of an emerging trend where mashups and APIs are developed to aid citizens in monitoring government and its workings. You can find more examples in the Government APIs and Mashups Dashboard.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Gov, Money at 1:16 AM | 1 Comment »

April 4th, 2008

Seesmic Acquires Twitter Mashup Twhirl

As reported at TechCrunch, the popular Twitter client twhirl created by German developer Marco Kaiser has been acquired by video chat service Seesmic. Besides the Twitter API, it also uses the Pownce API and the Jaiku API to allow cross-posting messages to those services. It is a very popular and very useful client that will have an interesting future. For more background on the acquisition, Seemic’s Loic LeMur gives 20 reasons why they acquired it.

On a related note, acquisitions of mashups is becoming a mini-trend that we’ll report on in more detail shortly.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Money at 1:49 AM | 2 Comments »

March 18th, 2008

45 Mashup Contests and Counting

If you know how to develop mashups then you may be in line to win some very big prizes. To get a sense of just how much money and how many prizes, take a look at the ProgrammableWeb Contest Guide and you’ll find that there have been more than 45 mashup contests thus far. Prizes include Xbox 360 systems, $10,000 Alien ware computer systems, $50,000 in cash, and more. The contest prizes are getting bigger and more spectacular all the time. For example, in September 2007, Adobe awarded a $100,000 “trip of a lifetime” to the winner of the AIR Developer Derby. In December, startup Ooyala won the $100,000 first prize in Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge (see our earlier post about the contest).

In March the contest with the biggest prize to date gets underway. The winner of Salesforce.com’s Force.com Million Dollar Challenge will receive a $1,000,000 investment in their start-up company and a cubicle at the Salesforce.com incubator for one year. The most recent contest announcement was just last week when Zynga announced a competition for game developers using their platform.

Winning Mashups

So, what types of mashup have people developed to win these contests? With more than 45 contests already having completed, the winning entries have spanned a broad spectrum, as you’d expect. Quite a few prize-winning mashups provide services that are of everyday value to people. For example, the Home Locator mashup, winner of the Adobe Flex Developer Derby, lets you search real estate listings with photos and maps (mashup profile).

Need a doctor after hours? As we reported last year, the After Hours Doctor’s Office mashup, winner of the 2007 Etel Mashup Contest, transcribes office voice mails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. It’s great demonstration on how to get in contact with your doctor when you know she or he is not in the office.

The PamFax mashup , which won the 2007 Skype Mashup Competition, lets you send a fax to any fax machine in the world, paying with your Skype Credit (our profile).

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering about campaign finance and influence in your state, take a look at the winner of the Sunlight Foundation’s Mashup Congress Contest. The Unfluence mashup will show you your state’s political contribution data (our profile).

So, what stories are others identifying as being very interesting and relevant? What better source for this information is there than Digg? To our benefit, Digg offers the Digg API to developers, and many people have taken advantage of this to develop some very useful mashups. The Digg Expose mashup takes Snap.com images from Digg and displays them in a configurable view. You can drag the images around, sort them, or change the category. The Digg Charts mashup (profile), another Digg API Contest finalist entry, is a Flex application that generates charts comparing popular stories. Additionally, a graph is generated showing a selected story’s popularity over time. See all finalists in the Digg API Contest in our earlier coverage.

And the Ooyala application that won Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge is really a platform and not a simple mashup. Ooyala provides capability for improving delivery, monetization and analytics of online video, utilizing Amazon web services.

Stay Posted

Mashup and API contests are clearly a growing venue for developers and API providers. Use the ProgrammableWeb Mashup Contests Guide and the Contests blog page to keep posted on ongoing and upcoming contests. If you know of a contest that isn’t yet listed, click the “add it” link on that page to share the information with the PW community.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Amazon, Contests, Gov, Money at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

March 4th, 2008

Discussing the Pros and Cons of Platforms

Over at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick takes a thorough and engaging look at APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons. Marshall spoke with a wide variety of people in the industry to pull together a lot of the key ideas and issues in this space. Here are some of the highlights:

• Just offering an API does not guarantee developers will use it. Paul Miller from Talis points out that “Nothing says someone will develop with an API just because you open it. You need the infrastructure, community and technical support around it. [For developers] the API has to do something you want, easier or better than you could it yourself, or bring some other benefits on the side.” If you look at the popularity of APIs in our sample you’ll see that there’s a big difference in adoption across APIs.
• An API can be both a product and a distribution channel. As such it needs to have something to offer the developer. Chris Saad from DataPortability.org said that “if the network has no users, then it will have no developers…the reason dev platforms attract developers is because of their promise of distribution.” For some classes of service-based APIs like Amazon’s S3 or Google Maps this is not an issue, they provide value unto themselves. Mashup developer Taylor McKnight points-out that code reuse and time-to-release are valuable benefits of an API: Why reinvent the wheel when there are wheels available for the taking?” And because this is the end a business relationship, Oren Michels of Mashery and the Business of APIs Conference notes “One opens an API as a business development initiative, and so evaluating its success should be based on how it performs in that context.”
• It takes investment and commitment. Not just creating the API in the first place but supporting it, supporting developers using it, upgrading it, and doing this over the long haul. The major API providers know this and that’s why there are big events now like platform-specific developer days.
• Is it for serious development? The popularity of map mashups and lightweight Facebook apps drive this question. But Esther Schindler, of CXO Media, made the apt point that “ANY development can be lightweight crap. Using APIs isn’t really part of that issue. It’s all a question of good design.”
• The importance of open standards. The best APIs leverage open standards extensively. From the basics like RESTful HTTP and XML to newer ones like JSON and OAuth.

It’s a good overview which in its breadth points out how much discussion and debate there is in this fast moving market as well as how it’s only just getting started.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Money at 4:50 PM | No Comments »

January 31st, 2008

Amazon Web Services Make Earnings News

The just released Amazon Q4 2007 earnings report, besides showing that the company doubled profits this quarter, had a couple very interesting notes related to their growing suite of web services. The first is that bandwidth usage from their web services exceeds that of their web sites:

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the point at which Salesforce.com began to process nearly as many transactions via their APIs as through their application proper.

And the second piece of news from that division is that “Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter.” These two details go hand in hand with more developers signed-up and more usage of the core pay-as-you-go infrastructure services.

You can read more on the Amazon results from BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof, paidContent, TechCrunch and Laurie Flynn at the New York Times.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Infrastructure, Money at 1:21 AM | 2 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 »

January 2nd, 2008

Amazon DevPay: Resell Your Web Services

The Amazon Web Services team just ended an impressive year with one last innovation: Amazon DevPay. DevPay builds on Amazon’s strengths in running both online shopping services and online web services to create a business infrastructure to support developers using their web services like S3 and EC2. It helps simplify the process of billing and tracking for apps that use these pay-per-use Amazon APIs, essentially enabling a reseller model (DevPay also includes it’s own licensing API and you can see our a API profile here).

As they describe on the AWS blog:

This new service allows entrepreneurial developers to wrap their own business models around Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, taking advantage of Amazon’s existing customer base and billing infrastructure. With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us.

Developers use DevPay’s web-based registration interface to create pricing plans for their applications, monitor customer signups, and track usage. The developer’s customers use another web-based interface to sign up and enter payment information for the applications that they wish to use.

You can think of DevPay as an enabling technology for our other services.

There were some initial questions about the differences between the Amazon Flexible Payments API and DevPay, which the AWS team has clarified here.

Using Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), developers can accept payments on websites. It has several innovative features, including support for micropayments.

Amazon DevPay instruments two Amazon Web Services to enable a new sort of Software as a Service. Amazon DevPay supports applications built on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 by allowing you to “resell” applications built on top of one of these services. You determine the retail price, which is a mark-up above Amazon’s base price. Customers pay for your application by paying Amazon. We deduct the base price plus a small commission; then deposit the rest into your Amazon account.

It’s another intriguing building block in the web services infrastructure stack. The cost? “Your customers will be billed for usage of their DevPay-powered applications on the first day of each month. We will then deduct a 3% fee plus another 30 cents, and deposit the remainder in your DevPay account.”

One of the first S3 customers to begin using this service is Amanda Enterprise, a supported version of the Amanda open source backup and recovery tool which now use DevPay along with Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve customer data. See Amanda profile here.

Looks like SmugMug might start using it soon as well.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Infrastructure, Money at 12:28 AM | 2 Comments »

December 12th, 2007

MapSpammers Coming to Mashups?

Earlier this year in Beware Mashup Spam we saw how spammers were working on gaming Google Maps via mass uploads and creating questionable or false listings. Well, Search Engine Land’s Mike Blumenthal has just followed-up on his initial report with more in yesterday’s MapSpammers Getting More Sophisticated.

In a nutshell, Mike reports on get rich quick schemes in which the spammer uses post office boxes in any city to “legitimize” themselves and get ranking in Google Maps. The overall scheme is to: “Rent a mailing address with forwarding in every major market near the centroid of the city (UPS is one of many that offer this service); Obtain a domain name for each city with a relevant “location + service” domain; Create a website that returns an optimized “location + service” page for the domain; Enter the businesses in the Google Local Business Center (if you are doing the top 50 metro markets, not such a big deal) note: skip this and the next step if using Yahoo Local; Enter the PIN numbers when they are forwarded to you; Get rich quick.”

Read the rest of “MapSpammers Coming to Mashups?” »

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Issues, Law, Mapping, Money, Popular at 2:15 AM | 4 Comments »

November 9th, 2007

Mashup Startup Teqlo Folds

Teqlo, an early mashup tools startup, is shutting down as of this week. As reported by Anne Zelenka at GigaOm yesterday, their doors are already closed and teqlo.com is no longer up. This does not come as a complete surprise given the struggles they’ve had this year including management turnover and changes in product direction. According to the report Teqlo founder Jacoby Thwaites confirmed that the investors had pulled out and said “We had great investors, great people and great technology, but we ran out of time working out what the killer product could be!”

Even though Teqlo has withdrawn from the battle, there are dozens of companies vying for position in the mashup tools market. For more on this competitive space see our earlier report on Challenges in the Mashup Tools Market.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Money, Tools at 12:39 AM | No Comments »