The winners of NYC BigApps 2.0 competion have been announced. In one of the largest open government initiatives of its kind, the competition provided developers with access to over 350 sets of official New York City data and asked them to build applications on top of that. The public round of voting commenced in February, to choose from 58 applications that spanned mobile, web and SMS Apps that targeting various NYC public data sets.
The debate over RSS never seems to end. 2011 kicked off with a widely read post predicting the decreasing influence of RSS in 2010. There have been responses from Fred Wilson and GigaOM that argue it is still relevant today. We believe that it continues to be a solid mechanism for web sites to aggregate data from multiple sources, as displayed by the 121 RSS APIs in our directory. In this post, we’ll look at RSS beyond blog syndication.
Telephony platform Twilio has a long running developer contest, giving Netbooks and Twilio credit to the winners. Recently it had a special contest, in which the winners could meet with Union Square Ventures partners for lunch. The winner of the contest is Asthmapolis, a site that helps track, manage and research asthma.
ProgrammableWeb has been tracking Twitter mashups since the first one was added in December, 2006. Looking at the number developers have added to the database, one thing is clear: 2009 was a huge year for Twitter and apps built upon it.
The Haitian earthquake disaster prompted a quick response from tech companies, who have provided practical applications to aid in the disaster response. The Microsoft Translator Team has pitched in by announcing that Creole, a language spoken by nearly 80% of Hatians, is now supported in its language translation service Bing Translator.
This past week we had 6 new APIs added to our API directory. These new web services include the first “foreclosure API”, a basic API for generating random numbers for use in casino software, an used car API to let you search 2 million vehicle listings, an API for geo-locating mobile phones, an API for accessing a large marketplace of freelance workers and teams, and an API for creating print-on-demand postcards. Below is more detail on each of these new APIs:
Lately we’re seeing a lot more talk about API monetization. Last week we covered TweetPhoto’s efforts at encouraging developers to use the TweetPhoto API through a transactional payment model (one penny or so for each photo uploaded via the API). Last month we covered Bandsintown, which provides affiliate earnings via use of its Bandsintown API. And more recently Touchnote announced an affiliate payment model (with a whopping 30% royalty) for developers working with its image API.
Yahoo has moved forward with a great improvement to its Yahoo Query Language (YQL) platform (our YQL API Profile). As you may remember from earlier this year, YQL is a SQL-like programming interface to lots of Yahoo data and APIs that can also support non-Yahoo data as well (think of queries that look like: select id from flickr.photos.search where text=’car’). Until recently, the YQL platform only supported read operations, which meant that developers could only pull data from the web. Now Yahoo has expanded YQL to support INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.
As part of our ongoing series of posts highlighting the latest new APIs on ProgrammableWeb, in the past week days we’ve added 10 new web service APIs to our listings. They cover a range services from handmade goods (Etsy) to music (Song.ly) to government data (FRED). Since we won’t have time to cover all of these individually, here’s the full set of new listings:
The new Obama administration’s focus on transparency and the recent economic crisis has given a great deal of attention on the value of online APIs for accessing government data. One of the latest examples comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis who have recently released a new API to access their FRED database, a comprehensive collection of U.S. economic trends. The API also provides online access to ALFRED, an archive of historic economic data, which features information dating all the way back to the 1920s. We’ve added a FRED API Profile with technical details.
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