Despite the fact that Google has been slowly launching more APIs for Google+, don’t expect the company to launch a full read/write API anytime soon. During a Google+ platform fireside chat at Google I/O today, Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz and other members of the Google+ team said that Google is still taking a very deliberate approach to Google+’s APIs. The company, Horowitz said, doesn’t want to… → Read More
We’re all a bit tired of the “X is Twilio for Y” brand of analogies (though it’s refreshing to see more of Twilio in this equation than Airbnb these days), but if ever there were an industry in need of some modern, standardizing APIs it would be education. Thankfully, Clever, a San Francisco-based startup and member of Y Combinator’s current batch, is today launching a solution that brings some of… → Read More
Ever since Google introduced limits to how often developers could ping its popular Maps API for free and started charging developers for usage above these limits, we’ve seen a slew of prominent developers like Foursquare switch over to other platforms, including the open-source project OpenStreetMap. Now, it looks like Google has noticed that it couldn’t keep charging up to $4 for 1,000 map… → Read More
BancBox, a startup that’s been flying under the radar over a year, is launching its new payment services platform today. At first, you might think the most apt comparison is that of Stripe, which also offers a developer-friendly way to accept payments on web and mobile. But BancBox goes much further than transactions. The platform lets developers build all sorts of payment services within their… → Read More
Diffbot, the super-geeky/awesome visual learning robot technology which aims to “see” the web the way that people do, is today announcing a new infusion of capital. The company has closed $2 million in funding from a number of technology veterans, including EarthLink founder Sky Dayton; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab; Brad Garlinghouse, CEO… → Read More
Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launching the Bing Search API on its Windows Azure Marketplace, but unlike its previous announcement, the company has decided to continue to offer a free tier as well. Developers will still be able to make… → Read More
As the daily deal space has become increasingly crowded over the last two years, local merchants increasingly feel pressured to run deals, but for many reasons, they end up overwhelmed by the prospect of managing those deals from start to finish, and the big deals players are failing to help them.
So, Setster has decided to do what LivingSocial, Woot, Gilt, and other deal providers are either… → Read More
Ever since Microsoft launched the Bing API, this service was available for free to developers who wanted to use data from the company’s search engine in their own products. Today, however, Microsoft announced that it will soon start charging for access to the Bing Search API. The subscription price will start at around $40 per month and will include 20,000 queries. As part of this change… → Read More
Eager to put their privacy issues behind them, Path CEO Dave Morin has just pulled back the curtains on their new Path 2.1 update at an event in San Francisco, and it’s already shaping up to be a doozy.
Morin notes that photographs make up the lion’s share of 100 million+ moments shared through Path, and to make them more memorable, the 2.1 update includes enhanced focus/exposure controls… → Read More
PowerInbox, the email platform that lets you run apps for Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Google+ inside your inbox, is today announcing the launching of its API. With this addition, companies that want to make their own emails interactive can now do so. Kicking off the launch, PowerInbox signed up ten partners who used the API to build email apps across several verticals including video, shopping… → Read More
Open data platform Factual.com is launching a new API for developers of location-based services called Resolve. The API is an entity resolution API that makes partial records complete, matches entities against one other and assists in the process of de-duping and normalizing datasets.
What this means is that developers can simply tell Factual what they know about an entity (i.e., a venue in a… → Read More
Ask any developer working in this space, and they’ll tell you that accurate grocery product information is hard to find via an API. To help solve this problem, the team from shopping list creator AisleFinder have launched Supermarket API, an open source API for the grocery industry.
The new API contains product details on over 150,000 grocery items as well as aisle info for over 2,400… → Read More
ReportGrid, a recent graduate form the 2011 TechStars Boulder class has just raised a seed round in the amount of $750,000. The company, a data analytics as a service offering, is notable for powering its API for analytics and reporting through a cloud-scalable database and visualization engine.
Principal investors in the round included Launch Capital, David Cohen, Walt Winshall, Doug Derwin… → Read More
Developers anxiously awaiting the Google+ API (application programming interface) will have to wait a little while longer, we’re told. Although Google is hard at work on building the tools which would enable developers to build third-party applications for the new social networking service from the search giant, the API’s launch is still “months” away, putting its launch closer to year-end. → Read More
In more news of Flash’s impending decline, Google is announcing that it’s “deprecating” the Google Maps API (application programming interface) for Flash. This API previously allowed developers to add Google Maps functionality within their Flash-based applications.
However, as of today, use of the API is limited, says Google, with only a small number of applications taking advantage of features… → Read More
Pushpins, Inc., the makers of a mobile app for saving on groceries, have launched a new service called SimpleUPC targeted towards mobile app developers. SimpleUPC, which is available as an API (application programming interface), provides product information as a service for the use in mobile apps like barcode scanners, shopping lists and nutrition trackers.
The API contains data on over… → Read More
You may have heard about the social graph and the interest graph, but what about the health graph? Thanks to RunKeeper, this term may soon become an oft-used part of your vocabulary. RunKeeper, for those unfamiliar, was founded three years ago as a simple iPhone app and a small online fitness community designed to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts employ smartphone technology to better… → Read More
Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn. So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Persistence, it seems, is key. (It also helps to have a great idea and… → Read More
European music startup musiXmatch will be announcing today at the MusicTech Summit in San Francisco that it has closed a $3.7 million series A funding round for its digital lyrics platform. The round was led by Italian investor Francesco Micheli Associates. musiXmatch adds to the prior $700K it has raised in seed funding from both Francesco Micheli and a former Dada executive.
Lyrics are one of… → Read More
I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win.
If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that… → Read More
John Gruber tackles private APIs again on Daring Fireball, noting that even some homegrown solutions to mimic iPhone private API calls has been banned inexplicably by Apple.
The API in question is Cover Flow. Most internal Apple applications have access to the coverflow system but when a coder decided to mimic the system, his product was banned for using a private API. In fact, Apple has been… → Read More
It hasn’t been too long since Google launched its iPhone search app missile and struck targets deep inside my heart. Like most missiles, it blew a lot of weak, defenseless things into oblivion (I’m looking at you, Google search bar in Safari). But also like a lot of missiles, it came with its fair share of fall-out. → Read More
It’s no secret that Yahoo has been struggling. It seemed they went one way and the rest of the web went another. Well, fine. They’re big enough to take to take a few wrong turns. Now however, they want to get on the same path that others like Facebook and MySpace have been following. To do this they need to attract developers – developers that have been flocking to other sites such as Google… → Read More
mocoNews.net had a chance to sit down with some T-Mobile brass and get some details about T-Mobile’s upcoming developer program. Here’s the short version (you can read the whole thing here). → Read More
MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August. It’s another example of data portability in action (as well as… → Read More
Alright, I’m not diving that far into this, but here’s the deal: WWDC is approaching, Jobs will speak about OS X Leopard, and will most likely unveil the “top secret” features Apple has kept under wraps. But these secrets could blow away the idea of an operating system as we know it. See, the next incarnation of OS X might be animated is what I’m trying to tell you… → Read More
This evening, I came home and loaded up Drudge Report. I found an interesting article on Google and how they’re about to challenge Microsoft even farther with offline web applications. Upon discovering the name Google Gears, I promptly typed “gears.google.com” into Firefox. Sure enough, a Mac OS X beta of Google Gears is available and of course, I downloaded it. So what is Google… → Read More
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