Last month saw the first-ever “Small Business Saturday” (at least according to American Express, the initiative’s sponsor). Small business get plenty of attention in terms of their finances, but what about their web application needs? The Small Business Web is “a directory of web apps to help small business bloom and grow.” The site was founded about two years ago by FreshBooks (invoicing), MailChimp (email marketing), BatchBlue (customer relationship management), Outright (accounting), and Shoeboxed (receipt management). It now lists dozens of applications across several more categories.
Transloadit offers media upload, modification, and storage as a service for developers who need that functionality (or, as Transloadit’s homepage puts it, “geeks who run web or mobile applications”) but don’t want to worry about it themselves. There aren’t too many moving parts to it, but they’re ones a lot of applications make use of. The Transloadit API’s main functions include: file upload, image resizing, video file encoding, image thumbnail creations, and file storage on Amazon S3.
File sharing service drop.io last week struck a deal with Facebook in which the larger company will acquire “most of drop.io’s technology and assets.” Founder Sam Lessin, a friend and former schoolmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will go work for Facebook in product management. As of the announcement, users ceased being able to create new “drops” (the service’s term for file uploads) for free. Existing premium users will have access to their accounts through December 15th, after which time all accounts will be terminated and all stored content will be deleted. Not all of drop.io’s products are being wound-down quite as quickly, and at least some of the developer APIs will be remaining up for longer than the main service.
The number of services offering real-time APIs is slowly but surely expanding and it looks like we’re going to have to add quite a few more. Since the start of the year a new type of service has started to appear–client push services, which help developers include real-time updates in their web apps.
Got an idea for a new website? It’s easier than ever to build a first-class application by offloading some of the harder stuff to other services. Read on and discover that your new site is already halfway built.
SaaS and cloud services provider LiveOps has just announced the release of a new “cloudsourcing” API for its LiveWork service. The Open Workforce API (OWAPI) enables businesses to integrate applications with an on-demand virtual workforce provided by LiveWork (more at our Open Workforce API Profile).
SaaS vendors need to get a clue about open APIs. That’s the takeaway from a panel discussion at last month’s Interop event in Las Vegas. According to Network World’s coverage of the session on Herding Cats: Managing SaaS Sprawl, with panelists from Boomi, Appirio, OpSource, and NetSuite, too many SaaS vendors do not consider including an open API as a core part of their service:
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
