Stock trading systems community Collective2 is bringing automated trading systems to the retail brokerage customer. Joe Shmoe can now have access to a trading system developed and practiced by an experienced broker, mad technical analyst, or possibly even a computer algorithm. The Collective2 API will make it possible for quant systems all over the internet to trigger trading in unknown numbers of retail customer accounts. Dangerous? Frightening? Futuristic? Yes, Indeed.
Jonathan Stark’s Starbucks card is seeing a lot of use this week. That’s because he’s sharing it with the whole Internet. Anonymous people are both using and adding money to the card and we can all follow the balance with the Jonathan’s Card API or over the tweets which come rolling in once per minute.
Google may not have landed Groupon in its quest for traction in daily deals. Instead, it acquired The Dealmap, an aggregator of local coupons. With the purchase by the search giant, we now list 89 Google APIs in our directory, with The Dealmap API now part of the Google arsenal.
Location data and storage company SimpleGeo has announced plans to change its pay-per-use pricing for the SimpleGeo API, removing a free option for low volume users. Instead, the company will offer tiered pricing, with 60 day free trials at every tier.
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.
Waiters like to work in pricey restaurants serving wealthy patrons because they are able to pay for high class service. That’s also why you see so many professionals in the banking industry: it pays to work for people with money. Xignite took note of this and decided to become the Maitre’d of information to the financial industry. With more than 3.5 Billion calls per month to its Xignite APIs, it is doing a fine job of it, as well.
Do you remember what it was like to figure out what was going on in your city fifteen years ago? You probably called your friends. Less than 20% of U.S. households were online. People learned about local news and events from newspapers, TV and their friends. I remember a lot of nights that we were frustrated “nothing cool was going on.” Information was scarce, and people still paid for it.
As a consumer of APIs, one thing you encounter every day are API rate limits. Just about every API has limits on the number of calls you can make against their API. As developers, we accept the limits because in many cases we are getting the API for free. And in some cases, even the rates aren’t enough for a provider to get what it needs, as when Google put the kibosh on Translate. Are limits simply a sign that a provider needs to find a strategy that scales?
Business models were nascent in 2005, when ProgrammableWeb listed only 105 APIs in our directory. There were only four basic models, according to John Musser’s talk this morning at Glue. Fast forward six years and those same business models exist, but there’s a lot more detail, as the now 3,000+ APIs have refined the ways an API can make money.
Canada’s Yellow Pages Group (YPG) is launching a new developer ecosystem to support and stimulate startup innovation in the local search and location based services market, including a certified developer program and four ways to monetize applications. The new developer ecosystem comes partly from the group’s work with hackfests. “We got tired of seeing all these great ideas die after the hack, we wanted to make sure these potential local search apps were brought to market,” YPG’s Bradley Wing said. YPG understands the YellowAPI is a natural extension of its existing business model, and extends the reach of its advertisers by feeding their listings through 3rd parties applications built on the platform.
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