Appcelerator has acquired Singly, a platform that integrates third-party services in both web and mobile applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Singly will soon start to integrate its AppFabric and DataFabric service into the Appcelerator Platform and Titanium.
Singly, founded three years ago, went into open beta last December. Sarah Perez wrote at the time that Singly offers methods to speed up the process of writing code to authenticate users via third-party services, pull in their friends list and other data (think photos, bios, etc.) from various social networks and other services. The service further allows users to share across different social networks. The company referred to this as its “app fabric.” Singly also can handle data syncing, storage, de-duplication of data, querying and filtering of data.
Singly’s founders include Jason Cavnar, previously of social reader startup Nsyght; Jeremie Miller, best known as the inventor of the Jabber/XMPP open source protocols for instant messaging and Simon Murtha-Smith.
API Analyst Kin Lane said in an email interview that Singly did all the hard work in writing code that authenticates and integrates with top APIs. “This is tedious work, and takes a balancing act to navigate the unique oAuth and API endpoints for each API. Additionally it had a growing number of passionate developers, which will boost Appcelerator uniqueness. While there are a handful of other API aggregators out there, Jeremie Miller’s (Founder) expertise in this area is unmatched.”
It’s this pedigree, deep understanding of the technology and passion for open-source and community that helped Singly gain notice with developers. This was embodied in its APIs&IPAs tour of cities across the United States. According to its blog the events were not meetups or conferences or hackathons but just happy hours. They would partner with local tech companies, choose a bar in a startup’s neighborhood, and promote the event in order attract the tech community. Classic developer marketing.
The news marks yet another milestone for the API management space. Over the past several months, Intel acquired Mashery, CA bought Layer 7 and Programmable Web, the noted API database, was acquired by Mulesoft.