Apparently no one, not even those who are building complex web applications. And new startup Orchestrate.io just took a massive $3 million seed round to prove it. Orchestrate takes the queries that developers would typically write in order to build an application, such as geolocation, time-series, social graph, full-text search, and more, and unifies everything a developer would need in a single API.

In other words, all the time and resources that would typically go towards designing your data solution can now be redirected to building your application, as Orchestrate outsources the need for you to own and manage your own databases.

“Complex apps require highly optimized queries, so much so that major companies such as Facebook and Google wrote custom big data databases like BigTable to manage them,” founder and CEO Antony Falco told me yesterday. “Typically you would devote 20-25 percent of your resources to data management, so there’s lots of savings. But when creating new apps, you can also reduce the time barrier to building services, getting multiple weeks of savings.”

Antony Falco, CEO and founder

One of those savings: Often companies have had to run or access multiple databases to enable their applications. All of them have to be monitored and maintained, scaled as your app grows, and distributed geographically and across multiple service providers to ensure high availability and low latency.

With Orchestrate, that’s all built in, Falco told me, including geographical distribution. Simply use the Orchestrate API to insert, read, and update data, and pay no attention to whatever is happening behind the curtain.

Falco used to be a VP at Akamai, the content delivery network, so he knows a few things about scalability and access. And talking about scalability, Orchestrate is looking to fill a pretty big niche.

“Database and operating system licensing, servers, storage, power, labor, outsourcing, and professional services represents a market that exceeds $100B annually,” Falco said in a statement. “We believe our service will save our customers significant time and money, allowing them to instead focus on what matters most — the end-user.  With Orchestrate.io, our customers can build better apps, faster.”

The $3 million is for getting Orchestrate’s existing solution into production and hiring more engineers.

It’s a largish seed round — you typically see $750,000, $500,000, or less for seed rounds, but Falco, who acknowledged that it had some aspects of an A round, says that it will help the company expand further. And, for a company with global aspirations, some expensive requirements are just table stakes.

“With $3 million we will be globally distributed,” he says.

Falco is a serial entrepreneur, also founding Basho Technologies, maker of open-source distributed database Riak. Orchestrate was founded just three months ago, in March 2013, and is based in Portland, Oregon.

The investment was led by True Ventures with Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners joining in.

photo credit: adesigna via photopin cc

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In the Peanut Gallery, you can add intertitles to old black-and-white movies (the ones before any speech support, never mind the web). And you do it, of course, simply by talking to Chrome.

The API uses your computer’s microphone after you give it permission, and Google turns it into written text embedded in an old movie:

Once you’ve made a movie with your own special intertitles, you can then share it to friends. The movies include The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lost World, and Google suggests you can use them to say happy birthday to a relative, or just hello. I’m wondering when someone will use it to propose marriage.

The experiment is not just for fun, although there’s plenty of that.

“We hope that developers will find many uses for the Web Speech API, both fun and practical—including new ways to navigate, search, enter text, and interact with the web,” Google’s Aaron Koblin posted. “We can’t wait to see how people use it.”

This is a guest post by Walt Maguire, Analytics Director at ParAccel

The emphasis on “big data” has grown mightily over the last year, as more companies strive to draw useful intelligence out of increasingly massive data volumes from web clickstreams, sensor data, social media data and other large datasets.

One technology approach has dominated the discussion: MapReduce. MapReduce is open-source technology used for distributed programming, and its current incarnation “Hadoop” (named for its inventor’s son’s stuffed elephant), has been trumpeted as the new solution on the scene, the silver bullet for getting value from big data.

But while MapReduce and Hadoop are interesting and useful, the approach is nothing new, nor a panacea. While often cost-effective for inexpensive data storage and lightweight data processing, running analytics on Hadoop data has been challenging. Early adopters report that analytics in Hadoop are very slow to process — a big problem for analyzing giant data sets — and complex to write, due to not supporting SQL (structured query language, the lingua franca of analysts.)

Newsflash: Other technologies that solve many of the same problems have existed for decades, namely Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) databases, which are known for speedy processing of analytics and robust SQL support.

However, the MPP and Hadoop approaches are not mutually exclusive. Hadoop and MPP databases are increasingly used together by forward-thinking companies for a complete big data infrastructure that is cost-effective and leverages the best of both technologies.

Let’s compare the two approaches and look at a few specific examples of how they can be combined.

Map/Reduce and Hadoop evolution

At the heart of MapReduce are two functions called, unsurprisingly, Map and Reduce. A Map function’s role in life is to take some input data such as a list of words, apply some function and then map those inputs to output data. A Reduce function will take the outputs from a Map, and apply a function to reduce the input data into usable output data.

In the world of big data, divide and conquer is a must if we’re to cope with the data volumes generated today.

Example of a Map/Reduce function:

The initial driver behind the development of MapReduce was a paradigm shift in computer programming during the 1990s towards an approach called “functional programming.” Not long after it was first used at Google to speed up its indexing of the World Wide Web in 2004, the open source MapReduce platform, Hadoop, was developed. Hadoop delivered a reasonably complete way to develop distributed MapReduce programs. It had numerous gaps, but for those analyzing 10,000x as much data as they were five years ago, it helped.

The recent uptake of Hadoop has been driven in part by necessity. With the exponential growth of the Internet, machine data and the trend toward “saving everything,” organizations have more data than ever before, much of it in unstructured forms. So an innovation first created as a programming technique has been pressed into service as a specialized platform for distributed data processing. While it’s good at functions traditionally performed by ETL tools, it’s not as good at providing fast answers to questions.

Organizations risk finding themselves with a large repository of data in Hadoop that they can’t analyze very well.

Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) evolution

For many of the tasks necessary in processing and analyzing big data today, the Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) database is better. MPP databases also split up complex, large volume jobs into units processed across multiple nodes. While they don’t act exactly like MapReduce, they accomplish many of the same things, and are far better at some things.

MPP databases provide things taken for granted by database users for decades such as ACID compliance — meaning you will get predictable answers to questions. This isn’t enforced in Hadoop. Also, MPP databases include cost-based optimizers and monitor the distribution of data within the system; and as a result, they are generally an order of magnitude more efficient than Hadoop. So you can do things ten times more quickly, or do the same thing with one-tenth the infrastructure.

MPP databases do not solve every problem. For example, when the structure of incoming data is unknown or variable, an MPP database requires that this be structured at load time. So a measure of data manipulation must take place to prepare it. Also, appliance-based MPP systems can be difficult and costly to expand, whereas Hadoop is designed to run on any hardware. Software-based MPP database solutions don’t have this problem.

The following table compares and contrasts Hadoop/MapReduce with MPP databases.

Comparisons from the real world

Many firms have brought in both technologies for their big data infrastructure.

One large retailer found that Hadoop and an MPP platform are complementary. The company ingests large amounts of unstructured data and archives it at low cost with Hadoop; it then loads the data needed for analytics into the MPP platform via the vendor’s proprietary, high-speed integration module. Now, this retailer can run jobs 200x faster than its previous data warehouse, enabling more granular market basket analysis and customer segmentation. It leveraged Hadoop for low-cost storage and an analytic platform for doing the actual analysis,  cost-effectively solving a number of key problems with this combination of technologies.

This is a common model these days. Evernote, a Redwood City, Calif.-based developer of note taking and organization software, has a similar architecture, using Hadoop for low-cost data storage and processing of web application log data, combined with an MPP platform for analytics. For them, it was faster to move the data to a platform purpose-built for analytics than to try to run the analytics within Hadoop.

Evernote CTO Dave Engberg provides much more detail and a summary in the company’s Tech Blog:

Hadoop is great for cheaply storing a ton of data and performing parallel batch processing jobs in minutes instead of hours (or days)…But it’s not particularly quick for more complicated analyses that combine multiple different sets of data.…

Overall, the new infrastructure has met our goals. We can load and transform hundreds of millions of records in two hours instead of 10+, we’re generating far more (and far better) reports, and we can safely perform much more complex analyses of user trends than we could before.

In summary, there is a useful place for MapReduce and Hadoop in the big data landscape, but MPP technologies also offer significant advantages. Companies should strongly consider using both together to deliver big data infrastructures.

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Developers hungry to start creating apps for the Pebble smartwatch will be both excited and dismayed come the second week of April. The company announced today that it is releasing its software developer kit at that time, but it will only include tools that let developers create “watch faces.”

Eric Migicovsky, the creator of the Pebble watch, uploaded a video to his Kickstarter campaign — which has made over $10 million — today, updating backers as to the company’s progress and the upcoming SDK. He explained that the this is a “work in progress,” and also promised that 99 percent of the application programming interfaces (APIs) within the SDK will change at some point in the future as they build out support for developers.

“It’s an important step for us to get something out there and really show you, potential developers, that we’re shifting our focus from the initial getting-started period of Pebble to supporting developers as the write applications for Pebble,” said Migicovsky in the video.

The SDK focuses on “watch faces,” or the interactive home screens that, well, tell time. It’s mostly buttons-oriented, which means developers could be clever and create games based on those button interactions. Migicovsky showed off some of the creations from the company’s beta test of the SDK, which included a dragon that winks on the minute, a Mario who gets a coin every minute, and a “Snake ala Nokia” game that is just like it sounds.

Pebble is otherwise equipped to handle multiple running apps on the watch, but will likely release support for that in future iterations of the SDK.

Migicovsky went on to say that Pebble thus far has been really focused on simply delivering the goods — getting the smartwatches into the public’s hands. Because of that, Pebble has not been as communicative as it would like with developers and hopes that the launch of this SDK will change that relationship.

Update 34 – Pebble Watchface SDK in April from Pebble Technology on Vimeo.

hat tip Slash Gear; Pebble image via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

This is a guest post by Matthew McLarty

The Application Programming Interface (API) provides a link for smartphone and tablet devices to get data from the cloud, social networks to accept shares, and data to easily be exposed between companies.

For information technology, this is the age of APIs.

In the early Web, data was shared through bulletin boards and forums. As the Internet went mainstream, users demanded a better experience with guided tasks, and a three-tier architecture became standard. This application topology led to many isolated islands of logic and data, which were made accessible by the introduction of web services which allowed third party developers to build applications to connect them through APIs.

The web giants leading the way in social business recognized the importance of APIs from the get-go. For instance, Google’s dominant search and map services are both accessible through APIs.

Salesforce pioneered the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model by offering both a web-based user interface and a web API. Twitter gained ubiquity through APIs that allow its members to tweet resources from other sites. Even Amazon Web Services uses APIs as the gateway to its offering that has become the de facto standard for cloud computing.

Knowing where to start can be the biggest challenge.  What services should my API offer? Can it generate revenue? What will motivate developers to use my API? Read on for tips and best practices from the Web’s giants.

Treat your API as a business

An API is a new channel for your business. It can generate revenue directly, be used as a business development tool or as a means of integrating with other applications in the ecosystem. In the early 2000s, Salesforce popularized the SaaS business model, shifting away from managed services or value-added networks by providing self service administration to their clients and a menu of payment options to fit any size business.

The Salesforce API was a fundamental enabler for this approach, and served as both a way of interoperating with and competing against Siebel and SAP. If Salesforce.com had launched as a web application only, the job of integrating key enterprise data from existing systems would have been left to the client, and would have eliminated the value proposition of the SaaS model. This well-documented, standards-based API provides flexibility for clients to adapt their customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and enables third party app developers to build new solutions that embed Salesforce’s services.

Align your API with your value proposition

Amazon struggled early as a books-only retailer, but an ambitious scope change led to its dominance in publishing and retail. In parallel, the company made a brilliant move by leveraging its excess processing capacity to create Amazon Web Services. Now the leading public cloud computing platform on the web, this is where Instagram, Pinterest and many other successful startups run their systems.

Amazon recognized the struggles of startups to build out their own infrastructure and delivered a hosting solution that provides a more palatable on ramp, allowing smaller companies to scale to the highest enterprise SLAs. AWS has become a profitable business unit for Amazon by providing a number of discrete infrastructure services—storage, application hosting, load balancing and more—that meet the needs of this target market. Recognizing that these services would need to be accessed by automated processes and not just human users, each is exposed through an API, allowing client engineers to administer environments that that suit small mobile startup looking for data storage in the cloud to large enterprises with high performance and availability requirements. This API-based approach perfectly fit the AWS value proposition and helped Amazon scale this business unit to an overwhelming leadership position in Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS).

Spoil the developers

Twitter has created its own form of media, and to some extent its own vocabulary, but its success is rooted in the quantity, renown and currency of its content producers. The first of the web giants who could truly claim the “mobile first” moniker (140 character maximum), Twitter sought multiple channels of communication from the outset. The vehicle it chose for transporting content in and out of its service was a web-based API. Twitter grew in parallel with the success of the iPhone due to native integration of its API with iOS, and by providing open access for third party app developers.

Twitter cultivated this developer ecosystem by ensuring its API was robust and well-documented while providing an extensive developer portal to facilitate self-guided learning and registration. To address third party identification and authentication, Twitter co-authored the original OAuth specification that has become the standard for APIs. The service is so compelling for developers, there are even books written about the Twitter API. By spoiling its developers, the company facilitated the growth in usage of its API and drove the popularity of Twitter itself.

Focus on usability

Google’s success can largely be attributed to its simplicity and usability. Personalization and advertising are embedded into the Google search experience, but never at the expense of the user’s core goal. Another hallmark of the company’s success has been its willingness to make small bets in the market, tagging many newly launched services as “Beta” for comically long amounts of time. This soft launch approach is effective because Google is fastidious about collecting user feedback and incorporating it during these extended beta periods.

Google has taken a similar approach with its APIs. The Google search mimics a basic REST API. Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube are all API-powered. The Android mobile platform provides connectivity to cloud-based services through web APIs. Google’s GData is a REST-inspired technology for accessing information on the web. In all of these instances, Google has taken care to provide a highly intuitive interface that encapsulates a useful function and is easily integrated into an application flow. There is now even an API Console providing unified access to all of Google’s services. Google has retained credibility with developers due its experimental nature, iterative approach and commitment to the user. The company flourishes in part due to the usefulness and usability of its many APIs.

Putting it all together

Any company looking to utilize an API to expose its services — and every company should be looking at this — can stand on the shoulders of these giants:

• Use your API as a new channel for your business like Salesforce
• Align your API with your core value proposition like Amazon
• Create a thriving community of developers that use your API like Twitter
• Keep improving your API’s usability like Google

Following these tips will help your company capitalize on the massive opportunity presented by the new era of social business.

Matthew McLarty is VP of client solutions at Layer 7, where he provides implementation best practices and architectural guidance to Layer 7’s customers that are building out their enterprise and API architecture. He has more than 15 years of technology leadership, with a particular focus on enterprise architecture, strategy and integration. Prior to joining Layer 7, Matt led the global IBM technical sales organization responsible for application integration software and solutions, notably helping to grow the SOA Gateway business substantially over a five-year period.

Maps photo via Fotografiche/Shutterstock

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Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii.

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

The move is widely being touted as a very wise one by Twitter — and for the right reasons. It enables Twitter to tap into the expertise of third party application developers with a proven track record of developing marketing platforms that help advertisers in launching, managing and optimizing their campaigns at scale.

Regardless of how big your advertising budgets are, Twitter’s Ads API and the value that it promises to deliver via third party ad solutions providers is unquestionable.

But how exactly will this impact marketers and marketing budgets? What tangible outcomes can advertisers expect from these third party ad solutions providers in the not so distant future?

Buying Twitter ad units just got easier

Balachandar Ganesh

Up until yesterday, the only way you could buy advertising real estate on Twitter was either off their basic self-service interface or from their direct sales team. Not only is this far from optimal, it is also extremely difficult to scale if you want to run frequent and multiple campaigns. There’s always been a demand for gaining more eyeballs on Twitter through advertising (Twitter sees nearly half a billion tweets on the platform every day!) and with this announcement, Twitter just widened the supply pipes.

The Ads API is a definitive step towards building a developer ecosystem similar to that of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. As marketers, it gives you the flexibility to buy and manage Twitter ad units from a variety of developers, and arguably, do so easily and effectively.

Creating ad campaigns on Twitter just got easier

Creating and managing ad campaigns on Twitter was a labour intensive process — a process that couldn’t scale to meet the requirements of agencies and big brands. Consider an agency creating thousands of new ad units for their clients every day. These ads had to be manually uploaded, one by one. Editing these ad units, if you had to, was equally painful.

Running scheduled ad campaigns? Forget about it!

By tapping into the goodness of third-party tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, GraphEffect from SHIFT and TBG Digital’s One Media Manager (and likely many more in the very near future), advertisers can now upload and edit bulk ads, and effortlessly create, plan and run ad campaigns like they do for Facebook or YouTube.

Reporting and analytics just got better

Twitter’s native ad analytics and reporting tools are, well, threadbare. Here’s a look at the entire repertoire of Twitter’s analytics for promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Twitter doesn’t offer much apart from pretty basic metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. Hardly enough to wet the lips of advertisers spending $200,000 per day on a promoted trend (yes, they’ve upped the price from the $80,000 they used to charge when it first launched).

Adding context to these metrics and enriching them with perspective that you glean from cross-channel ad campaigns is something that Facebook, LinkedIn and now, Twitter’s partner ecosystem is more than capable of delivering on.

You can squeeze more bang-for-your-buck with hyper targeting

Twitter barely offers anything in terms of targeting.

Since launching their promoted products suite, Twitter has offered businesses the ability to target by geography, by gender and only recently, by interest. There already is an impressive ecosystem of vendors that do some pretty neat stuff around generating in-depth audience profiles, like being able to suggest and rank individuals according to topic specific influence levels, or giving you a list of users similar to your target audience. As Twitter expands their Ads API partner ecosystem, marketing software vendors with a strong focus on analytics will be able to give marketers the ability to run highly targeted and highly contextual ad campaigns.

Want to run a promoted tweet campaign to get the attention of influential folks in technology, living in Palo Alto, and are unsatisfied Verizon customers? No problem!

You can finally expect data-driven real-time ad campaign optimization

The industry for tapping into the social web, mining for relevant conversations, and optimizing engagement is awash with hundreds of vendors catering to a wide array of requirements. In the process of adopting an ‘always-on’ approach in monitoring for trends or impending crises that could snowball into something disastrous, they generate a lot of real-time or near real-time insights. These insights can now be used to complete the feedback loop in optimizing ad campaigns at run time.

And maybe, just maybe …

Right now, the only engagement metrics on Twitter that are indicative of the success or failure of an ad campaign are retweets, @mentions and replies. You really can’t measure much else with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. However, Twitter is looking into newer ad units, giving advertisers more options to engage with their target audience.

The ad unit that Twitter is currently testing features an image with a ‘Get it Now’ button (see image below), giving marketers the ability to generate leads directly from Tweets. You can also expect Vine lending itself as a new, meaningful ad unit. 6 second videos on autoplay could very well be Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook’s rumoured autoplay video ads.

Whether or not Twitter chooses to roll out lead cards, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that Twitter will be rolling out newer, more complex ad units in the near future, enabling their partner ecosystem to deliver algorithmic, analytics- intensive, data-driven technology solutions so advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.

Folks, Twitter marketing just got serious.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii, an interactive web-based platform for business software selection. In his previous role as an enterprise software analyst at Ovum, Bala evaluated over a hundred enterprise technologies in depth and authored reports that helped businesses mitigate technology adoption related challenges. He also undertook a number of consulting engagements, advising companies ranging from garage startups to global multi-billion dollar firms. Bala is a graduate in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, where he focused on Internet Governance and Policy related issues.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Tweet bird

Literally.

That’s the sad reality of app development today, and fewer than half of users who download an app actually use it more than once. Which is precisely the problem that Scringo, an innovative toolkit for developers, is launching to fix. Scringo lets you add features like in-app user messaging, “radar” to let app users know when other app users are near, an app activity feed that can be public, interactive developer feedback, and more, in just two to five minutes.

Oh, and it’s free.

“We’re here to manage three problems for app developers,” Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy told me from Tel Aviv. “Reach (or distribution), retention, and revenue.”

Those are pretty much the core challenges for appmakers: getting users, keeping users, and yes, making some cash from users. Avrahamy says, accurately, that there are hundreds of APIs and software development kit focusing on these issues. His goal was to bring together the key needed features in one single SDK.

Source: Scringo

Scringo’s customizable sidebar

Scringo’s SDK is cross-platform for Android and iOS, and integrates into your app in minutes, according to the company. Avrahamy isn’t a developer, and he says he’s integrated Scringo into an app in about five minutes. The fastest he’s seen a developer do it is just over two minutes.

With Scringo integrated into your app, you now have a new totally customizable sidebar that appears and disappears as needed, and contains social login capabilities, the ability for users to share their activity stream while in the app, and the communication functionality mentioned above. Radar helps app users connect with others, if they choose. And the feedback feature includes a “magic rating system,” which, when a user rates the app at five stars, prompts him or her to rate it on the app’s app store.

“The activity stream turns your app into a live dynamic community,” Avrahamy said. “One developer integrated it into a NASCAR app, so users could like cars, drivers, or tracks. Every time a user likes something, it shows up in the activity feed.

Scringo also includes an action button in the activity feed, so if the activity is, perhaps, buying a shirt, others who see it can also buy the T-shirt. Avrahamy calls it “enriching the inner virality of the app.” And a push notifications functionality that helps developers stay in contact with app users, and inform them of important new updates or capabilities.

All of the features are customizable in Scringo’s “Developer Zone,” where WYSIWIG tools control colors, icons styles, included features, and more, and update virtually instantly in the app itself.

Scringo 1.0 was in public beta for eight months, the company says, during which time about a thousand developers signed up and 260 apps actually went live on Google Play and Apple’s app store, ultimately reaching more than a million end users. That eight months of “intensive learning,” Avrahamy says, provided the data that informed what the company built into 2.0, which is its first fully released product.

That data includes how well the SDK helps app developers with their core problems.

“We compared apps before Scringo and after Scringo,” Avrahamy told me. “We saw a 97 percent increase in time spent in apps after integrating Scringo, and an 89 percent increase in recurring sessions.”

In other words, doubling the time, and doubling the uses. Or, as Avrahamy puts it, “we’re giving more reasons for the users to stay, and more reasons to come back.”

Source: Scringo

Scringo adds radar features to your app, optionally.

The big question, of course, is always monetization.

Developers have the option of using the monetization features that are currently built into the SDK, like buying T-shirts. And more monetization options will be coming soon, including a sort of app-store-for-developers inside the company’s developer zone, where developers who create interesting tools can offer them to other interested developers.

Currently, the revshare is 100% developers, 0% Scringo, which sounds like a great deal. Eventually it will likely be the now-standard 70-30 app store split.

The entire offering is very developer-centric and developer-friendly, so much so that Avrahamy calls the company a B-to-D company: business to developer.

“We have a mutual interest,” Avrahamy said, speaking of developers. “What we’re trying to bring is several options of monetization.”

photo credit: Sandeep Somasekharan via photopin cc

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The new SDK adds better mobile analytics that will help developers get metrics on sharing events and actual usage: what people are actually doing in their apps. In addition, the new tools will enable conversion logging from ads running in Facebook-connected iOS apps, and — currently in beta — logging of in-app purchases. Both of which, of course, will help Facebook-connected apps monetize better.

In addition, the new Facebook SDK adds better — and simpler — error handling.

“The SDK will now automatically categorize errors by common application handling behavior and provide helpers to simplify some common error response cases,” Facebook engineer Jason Clark posted today. ”In addition, the SDK will automatically handle a larger number of error cases including various iOS 6 cases such as password changes and expired tokens.”

It sounds like developers who have heard about the update are happy, so far, as the update is solving annoying problems. One, Jack Tihon from Endorse, said “It’s about time. I was living in a world of pain trying to unstick users with expired tokens due to various reasons (change password, sign out of devices, etc.”

With better tracking and analytics capabilities, the new SDK is almost starting to impinge on some of the functions of dedicated app analytics solutions like App Annie and Flurry, but of course in a purely Facebook-focused manner.

The update also includes bugfixes, is backwards compatible, and is available here.

photo credit: Steel Wool via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Twitter announced its new Ads API this morning, along with the first five partners who will be integrating it into their social media management tools. Essentially, agencies and enterprises who already use management tools like HootSuite and advertising tools like Adobe’s Media Optimizer can now buy and run ads right within those environments.

The first five partners are Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital. SHIFT produces GraphEffect, a social advertising solution, and TBG Digital is social media advertising agency.

“What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies,” Twitter’s April Underwood wrote in a blog post.

More on HootSuite’s new Twitter ad tools here …

In a smart move for Twitter, while the partners will provide their clients the ability to advertise on Twitter from within their tools, when those clients become Twitter advertisers, they will be Twitter’s clients, not HootSuite’s, or Adobe’s, or SHIFT’s. In other words, the ad-buying arrangement is consummated via the Twitter API, and the contractual agreement is with Twitter itself.

“We’re setting the accounts up with Twitter,” HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes told me this morning by phone. “The validation is done on Twitter’s side.”

While Adobe, SHIFT, and TBG are ad agencies and marketplaces, and HootSuite is a social media management tool, one of the really interesting partners is Salesforce, which is again adding to its toolbox in a quest to offer everything any company needs for any purpose, within its cloud. The company is announcing a new Social Ads Platform for Twitter today, which will be part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and likens Twitter’s move to the launch of Facebook’s app platform in 2007.

That might be a bridge too far, but it is a really pivotal move in Twitter’s evolution.

Which is ongoing, as Twitter’s Underwood wrote:

The Twitter Certified Products Program is also evolving to include ads products. In the coming months, we’ll begin to certify ads products that integrate with the Twitter Ads API and consistently improve marketing efficiency and ROI.

This is just the start of our efforts that will give advertisers more choice — and for our partners who are ad tool providers, the Ads API represents a new way for their expertise to meet the needs of their clients.

photo credit: x-ray delta one via photopin cc

Two groups met, one in New York, and one in San Francisco, and built “over 80 new ways to use Glass” over the course of the two-day session. They worked next to Google engineers, provided feedback on the platform, and saw the still-confidential Google Glass API, which developers and hardware manufacturers will use to build technologies and software that integrate with Google Glass.

Participants were basically sworn to secrecy about the API and any other details of the events, but Ryan Warner, an Android developer who was there, did give some feedback on the Google Developers post:

“Glass foundry was awesome!!” he commented.

Typically, the comments then devolved into an ad hominem discussion on the relative merits of MacBooks for development (small selection: “over-price pieces of trash,” and “the best laptop hardware you can get”). Kids will be kids.

Some photos:

The next chance for non-Google engineers and augmented reality enthusiasts to learn a bit more about Google Glass? The South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas:

If you’d like to know more about developing for Glass and you’ll be at SXSW this year, we recommend you attend Building New Experiences with Glass (http://goo.gl/pLoUu) with +Timothy Jordan  on Monday, March 11th at 5pm in Ballroom A of the Austin Convention Center.

As crazy as a pay-for-access social network might sound in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not without precedent. The Well was essentially the first social network, and it was expensive for people to access.

But the key, for Caldwell, is quality.

“I don’t believe that massive numbers of people will adopt something just because it’s good for them,” Caldwell told me yesterday. “To become mainstream, it must become truly better — MySpace was better than Friendster, and Facebook was better than MySpace.”

Not that huge numbers are the goal for App.net. Caldwell’s initial goal for the beholden-to-users-not-advertisers social glue that became App.net was a mere 10,000 users. App.net has already tripled that, and it recently reduced prices from $50 to $36 a year due to economies of scale.

Rather, the goal was freedom.

Freedom for subscribers, who would be the customers and not the product of a social network for perhaps the first time since The Well. And freedom for developers, who would not be at the mercy of a service that owed its capability to meet payroll to advertisers’ capability to make a buck, and therefore to their ability to package and sell users’ attention.

“In my first blog post [about app.net] I said I believed that the social API backends of Twitter and Facebook were really useful to developers, but unfortunately, they’re getting locked down,” Dalton says. “It’s not like the people running the companies are dumb or bad, but they have a business model that forces them to control the stream.”

Which means that that Facebook and Twitter — and any other social network that depends on ad revenue — have a financial incentive to “hose their developers” over and over again. The recent API dustup between Instagram and Twitter that resulted in Instagram photos being banned from the Twitter stream is just one example.

“All the things I’ve been writing about have been coming true,” Caldwell says.

Which is one reason why App.net recently introduced its new file API, which is essentially the building blocks for having your own private cloud without having to own any hardware. With the new API, if a Flickr user wanted to join 500px instead, she could simply import her photos from Flickr and pick up right where she left off at 500px. If — and here’s the massive caveat — both services supported the new API.

That caveat is one reason it makes perfect sense that in conversation, Caldwell still refers to his 6-month-old baby as “an experiment.” It’s a social experiment as much as it is a technological experiment, if not more so. The original idea was to only create a social API backend — a backend for literally almost everything that could be social online — and let developers play with it, build on it, all in a spirit of freedom and openness. User-centricity plus developer-friendly.

“Originally we weren’t even going to have a client ourselves … we didn’t want to build a client for it,” Caldwell said.

Eventually App.net did build a web client, more as a proof of concept than anything else, but Caldwell is more interested in what other developers are doing.

Source: App.net

Patter on App.net

Such as a new client for App.net called Patter which, Caldwell says, looks nothing like microblogging or even Facebook. In fact, it looks like AOL chat rooms, with different topics and rooms you can go into. In other words, nothing like anyone from App.net would have built.

“That’s exactly the point,” Caldwell says. “Stuff that we would never have expected ourselves.”

Whether App.net is a successful experiment or not is still an open question. Early returns are positive, but 30,000 users in a world with billion-user social networks is clearly a blip on the radar. It’ll be interesting to whether that blip is the tip of an iceberg, or just a rowboat tossed in the waves.

App.net, however, has two things going for it.

One is its developing community, who care enough about the service — and what it stands for — to pony up cash for something others think they’re getting for free elsewhere. These are the power users that are spending time on App.net’s fledgling front-end, building relationships and engaging in richer, deeper conversations than they’re finding elsewhere.

The other is that, as sociologist Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And Caldwell has a plan for that small, committed group to grow at a much faster rate. But that’s a story for another day.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

Crowdtilt has released a new product called CrowdHoster that makes it easy to build a custom crowdfunding site without having to write any code. This popular Y Combinator startup provides an online place for friends to pool their money together for a specific purpose, like a wine tour or a wedding gift. Unlike Kickstarter and and Indiegogo which mostly feature creative and business projects, Crowdtilt focuses on enabling group experiences or shared causes.
Conceived as the “WordPress for crowdfunding,” CrowdHoster enables businesses with limited resources to implement a crowd funding campaign directly on their site. The technology is based on the SelfStarter open source project. After presenting the Crowdtilt API in December for developer use, many people without programming expertise expressed interest as well. The team worked with fellow YC alum Lockitron to build out and popularize the SelfStarter codebase, integrating the API and adding in other features.

The technology is available for free on CrowdHoster.com. It includes a project page with a funding progress bar, sharing links, and customizable content areas; checkout capabilities with the payment processor of your choice, including Balanced, Stripe, Braintree, or Amazon Payments; project administration and contributor management.

Right now, CrowdHoster is by invitation only. Crowdtilt, which was founded in 2012, has raised $2.1 million to date. Some of its more noteworthy campaigns include a Halloween party on a mega-yacht, a chartered jet for New Years Eve partying in Vegas, and rallying for Twinkies to come back. Also, some good causes like raising money for hurricane victims.

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It’s all part of Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh’s secret plan to make the world a happier place. 20 million people visit the network’s sites every day already, and I talked to Rick Simpkinson, a technical product manager at Cheezburger, about the new initiative to grow that even more.

“We just came out of beta about a week and half ago,” he said. “We use the API to power our own mobile and non-mobile apps … and for the huge number of app developers that make apps that you can manipulate a photo from.”

One of the goals of the program is enabling a share-to-Cheezburger button in photo content creation apps like Rage Comix (iOS, Android), the hugely popular mobile app for creating comics and uploading them to the web. Rage Comics worked with Cheezburger during the beta, and is one of the launch partners.

“Before we made the API available, you can make a comic, but then could only share with your direct network,” Simpkinson said. “Now by working with us they can make Cheezeburger available as a publishing option.”

(If any content creation app developers are wondering whether they’d like their content displayed in the Cheezburger network, Simpkinson said the would be clearly credited wherever the photo or meme is displayed.)

Another goal was to enable flow of all the Cheezburger content throughout the growing empire of apps: Cheezburger is building apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 8, and the API is simplifying content access. I asked Simpkinson if the API would eventually be used for other content consumption apps as well — third-party apps — and he said there were no current plans for that.

Cheezburger is using API management service Apigee to manage access and use of the new API. With Apigee, Simpkinson said, “all the overhead of managing an API … managing quotas, throttling access, and managing access tokens,” is handled, leaving Cheezburger to focus on the social humor platform. Apigee also allowed Cheezburger to offer developer accounts linked to existing Cheezburger user accounts — a significant simplification.

The ultimate goal?

“As Cheezburger continues to innovate as a social humor platform, we’ll be pushing that innovation out through these apps and serving our customers the best funny content, where ever they are,” Simpkinson said.

Facebook shared a few of those details today.

Mozilla’s goal was to build a Social API that would integrate content from any social network directly to your browser, even when you’re not on the actual social network’s website, Facebook engineer Pamel Vagata said in a post.

Facebook’s implementation keep you connected with your Facebook friends while you surf the wider web.

Facebook Messenger for Firefox is the first Facebook product to use a key new feature of HMTL, WebSockets, at scale. WebSockets enable persistent connections between your web browser and a webserver in a manner that scales well and also uses few resources. Facebook rolled out WebSockets on its existing chat servers but also had to reengineer its front-end Messenger code to eliminate dependencies on code fragments that simple are not available in the browser implementation.

Facebook credits its organizational structure — small groups, independent engineers — with the capability to make the changes quickly.

“Our ability to work with a small team and push code on a daily basis meant we could rapidly iterate on the API design and feature work to get this integration into the wild,” Vagata said.

Facebook is the first major social network to make use of this API, but theoretically, any such site could make use of it. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a demo of Social API with WebRTC that shows off even more advanced functionality, such as chatting, video chatting and file sharing.

Here’s Mozilla’s overview of its Social API with WebRTC:

photo credit: Βethan via photopin cc

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But it’s not the written rules that are the problem. It’s the unwritten ones.

At least, according to Marco Arment, developer, blogger, general gadfly, and — of course —  creator of Instapaper. Arment is calling out Twitter for, as he puts it, “being a dick again” (yeah, check the URL, not the title).

The problem is that Atta Elayyan, who built Tweetro, a sweet-looking Twitter app for Windows 8, asked for permission to go over Twitter’s API connection limitations. Tweetro got popular, quickly, averaging 3,000 to 4,000 downloads a day from the Windows Store and bursting well past the maximum of 100,000 users that Twitter allows for free.

So he asked for an exemption, because Twitter doesn’t have an official Windows 8 client, making Windows 8 theoretically an underserved market which could potentially qualify for an ask-us-for-permission exemption. But Twitter has already announced that it is building one. So Twitter denied the exemption, saying:

We know that there are developers that want to take their passion for Twitter and its ecosystem to unique underserved situations. As such, we have built some flexibility into our policy with regard to user tokens – which went into effect September 5th, 2012.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve. As such, it does not qualify for an exemption.

Arment takes issue with that — as he has before – saying that the wording of the rule is vague and essentially meaningless. The real rule, he says, “if Twitter was honest and direct, is simple: ‘We don’t permit anyone to exceed the limit unless we feel like it.’”

That’s perhaps a little harsh, since the company has said don’t build Twitter clients, we’re doing that, and has announced plans for a Windows 8 native Twitter client. But it is shutting the door on developers who are promoting the service.

Which effectively means, according to Arment: Don’t develop for Twitter. And he’s taking that message to Twitter:

Honesty would be communicating unambiguously to current and future developers that their API access is tenuous, fragile, and time-limited.

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) November 16, 2012

and

Proposed honesty: “API features or access may be revoked for any client, at any time, for any reason, even if published rules are followed.”

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) November 16, 2012

Image credit: John Koetsier

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people consume content, as well as the way writers and editors create it. Today, Contextly has emerged from stealth mode to change the way digital journalists provide context in their stories.

Contextly was founded by Ryan Singel, a veteran journalist who cofounded the Threat Level blog at Wired. After a decade as a writer and editor, Singel is leaving to run Contextly full time. The guiding principal behind the company is the belief that context is everything, and the tools available to reporters are inadequate.

Contextly offers a plugin for WordPress that makes it easier for writers to include related links. Right now, connecting to other articles involves search engine queries, multiple tabs, and copying and pasting. These steps make telling a full story more time-consuming and frustrating than it should be. However, telling the full story is necessary not only to engage readers, but also to relay the news with as much truth and value as possible.

“Readers crave context in news, even as a reporter’s job of putting the day’s story into a larger picture is hard to do when speed is essential and the news cycle never stops.” Singel said in a blog post announcing his departure. “But writers — good ones — know that the day’s work is just part of a long-­term story that they and their co­workers have been telling for years.”

Online journalism has been descried as a step down from print publications, where information had to be verified by two credible sources and every article was fact-checked. However, one of the benefits of consuming news online is that readers can track down the truth for themselves and find background information and alternative perspectives. It also puts a massive store of knowledge at the disposal of reporters who can use it to inform their writing.

“Writers like related links because they make them feel like they are not just putting out yet another story that feeds the Internet beast, but that they are telling a larger story,” Singel said during an interview with VentureBeat. Those links are more important than people give them credit for. If you are reading something in a newspaper, it is not easy to go find out more information. Links can help readers discover new content, learn more about topics that interest them, and verify original sources.”

While building Contextly, Singel approached the design from an editorial perspective. He said writers have a deep institutional knowledge and need an efficient way to express it and tell a more connected tale. The widget “marries editorial control with serendipity,” and according to early beta testing on Wired, Contextly increases page views, as well as time-on-site. 

There is also a data analytics component. The engine gathers data on site visitors and produces readable reports that writers and publishers can use to inform their work. Use cases range from large online publications like Wired to individual bloggers to companies that are using their blogs to engage customers. As with any form of digital media, more traffic means more revenue.

“There is so much going on in online journalism,” Singel said. “There is so much experimentation and so much demand on writers. What we are hoping to do is make writers’ and publishers’ lives easier and more profitable, as well as explore fun new things. The online journalism world hasn’t totally figured out what the business model is and what readers want, and hopefully we will play a good part in figuring that out.”

Down the road, Contextly will release a series of other tools for digital publishing, but right now, Singel and his team are focused on related links. Monday will be Singel’s first day as a full-time entrepreneur in over 10 years, and while he expressed sadness about stepping out of the daily news cycle, he said he’s looking forward to the journey ahead. Read his full blog post here.

“It’s been a fun and difficult project,” said Eva Ho, a Factual vice president and a self-confessed health nut. “Nutritional data and ingredients are really difficult to normalize. After tackling CPG products, which we think will power a load of really wonderful couponing and commerce applications, we are moving on to things like electronics.” 

When it comes to data, both Ho and founder Gil Elbaz know their stuff. Their last company, Applied Semantics, provided the basic technology for Google’s AdSense, which earns Google close to $10 billion a year.

The new ingredients list allows developers to exclude products containing high fructose corn syrup or find those with green tea, which rather surprisingly includes everything from shampoo to dog treats. Developers can also query calories, level of saturated fat, cholesterol, sugars, sodium, and eight other parameters. If you want to avoid a mid-morning sugar slump, check out the sugar content of popular breakfast cereal brands as shown on the chart below. Factual has also added EAN-13 data, a 13-digit code used to identify retail products worldwide, in addition to UPC, the US standard.

Factual currently provides clean and structured data sets on places (Facebook was the company’s first customer), restaurants, healthcare providers, hotels, and consumer products. The company recently added real-time updates, which allow anyone to contribute data to a particular data set and have it validated by Factual’s machine learning algorithms.

“You can say, ‘This product is not kosher.’ We will then make our best guess on how that new piece of data effects the model,” says Ho. “The update gets pushed out into the production-ready data set in less than 10 seconds.”

Factual spent three years developing its automated processed for structuring and cleaning up data sets. The data comes from partners (with which Factual has many “data swap” deals), users, and the web.

“We look at millions of web pages and extract facts using machine learning and other techniques, ” Ho explains. “These signals are not always obvious. From a Foursquare check-in you can deduce hours of operation. We are not just scraping opening hours from a website.” Each new input is assessed based on the source. Trusted sources get higher weight. The raw data is turned into facts by mapping to a known semantic data type like a phone number or a zip code. This new fact is matched against the existing database to eliminate duplication and stored if it is supported by multiple, trusted sources. 

Factual’s data sets are currently most commonly used in local search, applications with geographical components, and e-health. Within large companies, they are used for CRM, credit scoring, supply chain analysis, and customer targeting. “What’s really fun is seeing a large financial services company using it both on the enterprise side for analytics as well as building, say a restaurant application,” says Ho.”So we are powering their digital initiatives as well as internal operational efficiencies. That’s been a little surprising for us.” 

So what’s the next big trend in the data business? “Companies will realize that by pooling their information, they will create a new data platform on which lots of new applications can sit,” says Ho. “In the past, the CPG manufacturers only had to worry about their data being published in Amazon and drugstore.com.

“Now there are thousands of mobile apps out there and their data is completely mis-represented. The pictures are wrong, the descriptions are wrong. If you want your data to be accurate, go to one central hub which holds it and cleans it.” 

Factual wants to be the Switzerland of data: tidy, neutral, and very likely rich. It may just get there. 

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Twilio, the telephony startup developers love to love, has just taken the wraps off a suite of new APIs, handy tools that will have developers asking, “Great! What took ‘em so long?”

The new goodies are threefold: First, a way to test your Twilio apps without incurring costs or sending real calls via Twilio’s REST API. Second, an API call to get all your usage records in one request. And third, a trigger-based notification that can ping you when your app starts tipping the usage scales.

“We have a lot of stuff in the pipeline, this is just a small amount of it,” explained Twilio dev Andrew Benton in a phone chat with VentureBeat. “Some of them have gotten stacked up and waited for TwilioCon, but we have a lot of stuff we’re releasing all the time.”

He also noted that the reason it’s taken Twilio as long as it has to roll out these seemingly necessary features is that the startup was tackling low-hanging fruit (writing documentation, assigning phone numbers on signup) first. “These are a little more complicated as products.”

Complicated on Twilio’s end equates to a little more simplicity and a lot less infrastructure and process for third-party developers.

For example, for the app-testing tool, said Benton, “You use the same API that you always have .. and use a different username and password for your API request. Those two pieces of information identify the request as a test, and we’ll never charge you or send a phone call.”

The usage requests and usage notifications are even more useful. The former lets you make a single API request and get your usage stats for a given time period in return. That information, said Benton, “allows our customers to build dashboards or internal tools to figure out what they’re doing with Twilio without having to set up a bunch of infrastructure on their side.”

As for notifications, that functionality will be especially valuable for Twilio devs whose apps include bundles of text messages or calling minutes. The tool lets you specify a usage trigger, then sends you a notification when you hit that limit.

“We can do automated monitoring for you, essentially,” said Benton. “If you know your application doesn’t usually send more than 1K text messages a month … you can set up a notification.” And with the notifications in place, you can automagically cut off or upsell your whales, implement a plan for rapidly scaling, or even just do some research on where all that lovely traffic is coming from.

That functionality in particular came in handy for Burner, the disposable phone number startup, Benton told us. Alpha testing the new features with Twilio customers like Burner has made all the difference in the final product, too.

“We’ve been working with them all through the product cycle,” Benton told us. “They’re really the ones who’ve driven this forward.”

Altogether, Benton said, the new tools will “allow [Twilio] customers to build a much more reliable application.”

Stay tuned for more as Twilio’s annual developer conference unfolds in San Francisco over the next couple days.

Top image courtesy of ARENA Creative, Shutterstock

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Tomorrow, the Paris-based company that built MasterCard’s PayPass SDK and counts McDonald’s and Reebok among its mobile commerce clients will release the Airtag Kit, a full collection of everything developers need to start building mobile payment apps.

MasterCard’s PayPass technology already enables swipeless credit card use: tap the card on the reader and go. Now the credit card giant, with the help of Airtag, is extending the same technology to NFC-enabled phones.

“The Airtag kit is the second part of our partnership with MasterCard, and contains all of the hardware and software needed to build and test PayPass apps, including resources for the developer community,” Airtag chief executive Jérémie Leroyer, who has moved to the company’s New York offices, told me this morning.

The hardware in the Airtag Kit includes a Samsung Galaxy S III, a USB contactless card reader which simulates an NFC point-of-sale terminal, five SIM cards (UICCs) that include EMV chips similar to those in secure PIN-enabled credit cards, and two demo sales tags to simulate NFC-enabled merchandise. In addition, tutorials, manuals, and forums are available to help developers get started.

Source: Airtag

The Airtag mobile payments developer kit

The kit retails for $4,550, which includes one year of access to the developer program. The developer program alone is $3,250, which suggests the hardware is valued at around $1,300.

With the kit, a developer will be able to create apps for mobile payments incorporating NFC technologies, such as the capability to order online and pick-up in-store without having to use a credit card, or simply payment at point of sale. But at those prices, not every startup will be able to afford one — certainly not on Y Combinator-type money.

Whenever NFC comes up, the inevitable question also arises: What about the iPhone?

“It’s very difficult to guess what is going to be in a new version of the iPhone,” Leroyer said, accurately. “But we didn’t expect NFC in the iPhone 5 … usually what Apple does is let others go into the market, see what they’re doing, and then bring out a version of the technology a year later.”

However, Airtag likes what Apple is doing with Passbook — especially the geofencing — and uses it in the Go McDo product the company built for McDonald’s. NFC does enable better security, Leroyer told me, and the company does expect Apple to add NFC capability in iPhone’s next major iteration.

And he welcomes Apple’s entry into the market:

“NFC is very powerful, but very complex. We need players like Apple to simplify the ecosystem, and simply NFC development. That’s where we want to go, and we share this ambition with MasterCard.”

Some, including Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR and mobile payments company LevelUp, might say be careful what you wish for.

photo credit: 401(K) 2012 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Shopsavvy is about to get a lot more useful for Best Buy shoppers. The two companies will announce tomorrow that the Shopsavvy mobile app, which you can use to scan and compare items from retail and online stores, has tapped into Best Buy’s API to let you research items faster and make purchases from the retailer’s online store.

Best Buy is already working with ShopSavvy to bring its product information and reviews into the mobile app, but this integration with the company’s BBYOpen API is a major step forward. Now you’ll be able to search for items on ShopSavvy within a Best Buy store and get them shipped to you within a few clicks. And thanks to the API integration, searching all of Best Buy’s data is much faster. (In-store pickup for purchases isn’t available yet, but that will likely appear down the line.)

“We really try to bring our products to where customers are,” Steve Bendt, the director of Best Buy’s emerging platforms (the group behind the BBYOpen API), told VentureBeat in an interview. He pointed out that partnering with apps like ShopSavvy is a major growth area for Best Buy, and the company has also built up a strong developer network taking advantage of the API.

“There’s more choice than ever today in how you shop for things,” Bendt said. “We need to be there. We’ve got an amazing store network that provides realtime fulfillment that we’re taking advantage of.”

The Shopsavvy app also offers mobile purchasing within its app from retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot, and Barnes & Noble.

The app started out as a simple price-comparison tool on Android, but it has since grown into one of the most popular options for mobile shopping on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The ShopSavvy app has been downloaded more than 40 million times and has more than 10 million active users, the company claims. ShopSavvy is also exploring new territory with its mobile app — earlier this year it launched a mobile marketplace to take on Craigslist.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco and Dallas and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million. Its latest funding round was led by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Jiujitsu is the art of using your opponent’s strengths against them. Apple may be applying precisely that strategy against Google in the middle of its Maps debacle.

Today’s apology from CEO Tim Cook was close to unprecedented — Apple just doesn’t apologize very often.  Immediately after the apology, Apple began to promote multiple mapping applications in the app store.

Oddly — or perhaps intentionally — none of them are based on Apple’s biggest enemy du jour: Google.

Apple-recommended map apps in the app store.

That’s partly because Google already lost a significant number of location-related developers, such as Foursquare, in March when the company jacked data access rates up. Only after learning that Google Maps was on the outs for iOS 6 did Google slash prices.

And it’s partly due to the fact that Apple’s Maps is now the default API for developers on iOS.

But even though Apple’s fly-by technology is the most-panned aspect of the new Maps app, showing the Hoover Dam bridge plunging to the surface of the river, Google Earth is not on the list of Apple-recommended apps.

Nor can I easily find any other apps that use Google Maps on the iTunes store.

One example: Maps+ says it uses Google Maps, but a colleague who checked the app on his iPhone says it’s clearly using Apple Maps, and the description is just out of date. That’s likely the case with many apps that were simply using iOS APIs that previously fetched Google’s maps and now transparently fetch Apple’s.

In addition — and obviously — the multiple Telenav-powered apps such as AT&T Navigator and GPS, as well as MapQuest and Bing maps (the most likely candidates to replace an Apple Maps app) are all not powered by Google.

So even while Apple has failed in its attempt to seamlessly replace Google Maps on the iPhone, the company has succeeded in its strategic objective: to get Google Maps off the iPhone … which may very well be part of a larger strategy to get Google off the iPhone entirely.

Providing mapping data gives users great directions but gives Google a lot, too: information on users, data on important locations, and advertising opportunities down the road. That disappeared, to a large extent, when iOS 6 happened — and Google is at least partly to blame due to its price increases earlier this year.

And Apple, while getting egg on its face, may be strategically farther ahead than before. Because even if users don’t use Apple Maps, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The likes of Waze, Bing, Garmin, or Navigon are never going to be the massive strategic threat that Google is.

All of which doesn’t mean that Apple made the decision about the timing of its switch from Google Maps knowing that Apple Maps might fall on its face and was willing to take that bullet to get Google Maps off the iPhone.

But it’s certainly possible.

Only time will tell if the long-term strategic benefits outweigh the short-term customer pain.

photo credit: produzentin via photopin cc

Speaking at a BuzzFeed panel in New York yesterday, Twitter co-founder and board member Evan Williams said that reach is a much more important measure:

“The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet.”

Engagement is certainly the metric that matters to marketers: if people don’t see your message, they cannot act on it. But follower count has long been a source of perceived legitimacy for some, and Twitter has previously taken steps to reduce its impact. Twitter even completely hit the reset button on follower account temporarily, after the infamous auto-follow bug.

Joking that he was on the board and shouldn’t say too much, Williams indicated some kind of engagement score may be coming, and that Twitter’s recent strategic shifts to a more-restrictive Twitter API access policy enable better measurement of engagement. If, after all, every Twitter client for consumers is created by the company itself, Twitter could much more easily determine exactly which tweets were requested by users, and make some pretty good guesses about which ones were actually seen and read.

It’s unlikely any new metrics would completely remove follower count from the picture — that would likely cause a huge user backlash, particularly from popular users. And follower counts can be a valuable measure of interestingness, for lack of a better word, as long as it is authentic.

But a new metric which measure virality and reach would certainly be welcome.

photo credit: id-iom via photopin cc

Here’s an API launch that won’t leave you yawning: 23andme is opening up its treasure trove of genetics data to third-party developers.

The Personal Genome API includes get calls for user data, profile information, and even specific genome locations.

“Opening our API offers an immense opportunity for customers to do more with their DNA,” said 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki in a statement on the news.

“While 23andMe has created a number of groundbreaking and innovative tools for our customer to explore their DNA, the API will open the door to the possibility of new web-based interactive tools to be developed by external groups.”

Of course, when you think about opening up data on genes, you have to think about how to use highly personal information in a way that respects individuals’ privacy. Accordingly, devs will be required to obtain individual-level consent for all data their applications use.

Basically, it’ll work much in the way that Facebook Open Graph apps work: The user has to log into the app with an existing 23andMe account, and the app has to ask for access to specific parts of the user’s 23andMe profile and/or genome information. If the user doesn’t like the level of access, he or she can deny the app access to the data.

The Personal Genome API is currently available free of charge for devs, who can sign up now for early access to the data. The company will evaluate apps that apply for early access on a case-by-case basis. 23andMe expects to change the kinds of data offered and the API terms and conditions as it observes different use cases and gathers feedback from third-party developers.

Top image courtesy of DNA Art, Flickr

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“We’ve got about 10 minutes. Please keep your questions focused on Techonomy,” one of them said.

Dorsey spoke at Techonomy last week in Detroit. I was there to hear him, among others, and visit Detroit startups. But I had a very specific question for Dorsey, and it had nothing at all to do with Detroit, or tech economies, or the speech he had just given.

It had much more to do with what Twitter is becoming.

The social network of now has massively tightened down access to its API recently, reducing the amount of Twitter data that third-party developers can use in their applications. Applications need to be certified, and authenticated, and likely, at some point, paid for. That’s causing some angst for developers, who — with some justification — feel that third-party applications are part of what made Twitter a massive success in the first place.

Source: John Koetsier

Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey at Techonomy Detroit

The tactic seems to be part of a larger strategy that takes Twitter away from its roots as a communication utility with open access for all and towards an old-school media and publishing company that jealously guards its crown jewels. O’Reilly Media’s Edd Dumbill calls it a “bait-and-switch,” saying that Twitter is now cable TV, or even Comcast, Verizon.

In other words, no more rip-mix-burn here.

So I decided to be a little rude. And I asked the question: what, with the API changes — and extended tweets that suck even more content into Twitter, discouraging user exits — is Twitter becoming?

Dorsey answered thoughtfully, as he always does.

“Whatever its users want it to be,” he said. “Twitter is a communication utility … ask 100 people what Twitter is and you’ll get 100 different answers, and that’s OK.”

Dorsey said that this was just the same as asking what the world is — again you’d get hundreds if not thousands of different answers, as each replied according to his or her own perspective.

“We’re just focused on building the best platform and making sure it’s up and stable,” he finished.

There’s no question that throughout Twitter’s history, users have played a huge role in determining the uses of the site. Retweets, hash tags, lists, search, and many other Twitter features were started by users and migrated into the core product as they gained traction.

But it’s hard to believe that users have asked for the Twitter API to be restricted.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen any demonstrators outside of Twitter headquarters asking the company to shut down small third-party apps in the consumer space that Twitter has claimed for its own. Nor have we seen hundreds of thousands of retweets on a Twitter-would-be-so-much-better-if only-we-killed-RSS-access message.

And so it’s hard to believe that the it is only interest for users that is driving the future of Twitter.

photo credit: ~Ilse via photo pin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s big vision was to organize the world’s information. Eric Warnke of Mover.io just wants to move it.

In an increasingly cloudy world of big data, transport is a growing problem. Megabytes and gigabytes may be no big deal, but when you start moving multiple terabytes from a corporate database to Amazon Web Services for processing on a regular basis, that’s a different matter.

Warnke, co-founder and chief executive of Mover, wants his company to be the default mover of data. Everywhere.

He’s aware that this is a big vision, and he says it with a hint of a self-deprecating smile. But he’s also deadly serious in his team’s ability to deliver a globally significant solution for a globally significant problem.

“We’re moving petabytes,” Warnke told me at the recent GrowLab demo day in Vancouver. “When you’re moving that volume of data, there are a lot of problems to solve.”

Quick reminder: a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes … which are each 1,000 gigabytes. In other words, just one petabyte is pretty massively large. Moving it is a correspondingly large headache.

Removing that headache and overhead for developers is the goal for Mover.io.

In fact, Warnke wants to do for data portability what Fedex did for shipping: Create a full-service single point of contact for getting files from A to B, with all the details managed for you. The company has already moved 40 million files for 11,000 users, and it’s still in private beta — with paying customers.

Mover.io has built Backup Box (“we move your stuff from anything to anywhere”) as a demo app showcasing what it does, but the end goal is not to create apps.

Ultimately, Mover.io will simply be an API developers call to move data. Need to move data? Call the API and call it a day. Currently, the company supports Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, and more, but the API isn’t scheduled to be released until the first quarter of 2013.

“Why so far away? We’re solving extremely massive problems,” says Warnke.

The company already has an investment from GrowLab but is raising a $1 million seed round now — a large chunk of which is already committed. The money will go to hiring more people (the team is only five right now), scaling the service, and setting up deals with various cloud vendors.

And the worldwide vision?

Warnke is strongly committed to it — when I wondered aloud whether Mover was a product rather than a company, he said he was not interested in an aqui-hire.

Google’s come close to achieving its vision. We’ll see if Mover can duplicate that astonishingly rare startup feat.

photo credit: eldeeem via photo pin cc

Rackspace picked up Mailgun today, a Bay Area-based startup with a web service to create and manage email inboxes within apps.

Mailgun, a graduate of Y Combinator, announced the acquisition in the company blog this morning. The startup, which provides email server tools, also incorporates tracking and analytics that lets developers know whether emails have been opened (pictured, below).

It’s a six-person operation, but Mailgun’s early customers include Y Combinator and the Financial Times. The startup has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from SV Angel, Y Combinator, and celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher since its launch in 2011. It will relocate from Mountain View, Calif. to Rackspace’s San Francisco offices.

Rackspace, an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, said in a statement that the deal “will further enhance Rackspace’s product portfolio, making it easy to integrate cloud-based email services into applications and websites within minutes,” adding that “our customers are asking for this and Mailgun is the right company to help us deliver it in a tightly integrated way.”

Rackspace is hot on the acquisition trail: This is its seventh buy-up. Since acquiring CloudKick in 2010, it added cloud monitoring to its suite of tools. The company is now the top cloud infrastructure provider after Amazon.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed; the acquisition is expected to close at the end of the week.

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Apigee has just released the latest version of its enterprise-grade, API-management software, and hold onto your hats: It’s free for anyone to use.

The Apigee API platform will now give its users self-service access to tools for building and managing APIs, as well as for using them to make apps financially viable for a business. The tools are free to use for up to 3.5 million API calls per month.

The Apigee suite includes “gateway” tools for companies of all kinds to transform their dormant data sets into APIs, then gives tools for using those APIs in apps featuring location, social, and other uniquely mobile features. Apigee can also help with API analytics and managing a community of third-party developers.

Of course, some of the more massive use cases out there will require billions of API calls per day, and for those use cases, Apigee has a separate, tiered system called Apigee Enterprise. Plans start at $9,000 per month, and prices vary based on usage.

Basically, Apigee is only charging for its “whales” and letting all the other fish swim free.

“We’ve worked with some of the largest businesses in the world to build and support highly sophisticated and complex systems that easily handle billions of API calls per day. We’ve now taken this technology and simplified it so that any organization — from a developer in a garage to a Fortune 50 company — can launch like a startup and scale like an enterprise,” said Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor in a statement on today’s news.

“Apps are quickly changing the way we all interact and do business, and APIs bring apps to life with rich streams of data and web services. We are confident that the Apigee API platform will dramatically accelerate the growth of the app economy.”

Apigee was founded in 2004 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. To date, the company has raised $72 million in five rounds of venture capital funding.

The company also tells us that currently, around 20 percent of top 100 Fortune 500 companies use Apigee, and the Apigee platform handles around 100 billion API calls per month.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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Of this class, four companies have health-related products, although only two have announced themselves publicly yet.

Eligible is an API that makes it easier for the medical practitioners and insurance companies to assess patient eligibility.

As it stands, figuring out eligibility is a time-consuming, complicated process that sucks time and money. It is an offline process of paperwork and phone calls that can cost between $3 and $4 per claim. Furthermore, people on all ends of the health care system deal with eligibility questions — with more than 10 billion eligibility queries in last year alone.

This technology makes it easier to process questions regarding patients active vs. inactive status, coinsurance, copayment, deductible, health spending balance, and specific information like MRIs and diagnostics. It eliminates a lot of the back-and-forth and confusion on what care patients are eligible for. The API takes care of the complicated, technical elements on the backend so medical and insurance providers only need to handle the interaction with patients.

The company currently works with over 700 insurance companies and earns money from both developers and and insurance companies who use their code.

Another health company, Healthy Labs, provides a social network for people with chronic conditions. Read more on VentureBeat.

For the other two, you will just have to wait until they are ready to launch.

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And, if I’m not mistaken, Twitter’s guidelines have a lot of do-as-I-say, not as-I-do.

Source: Twitter

The first tweet

On March 21, 2006, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey posted the first-ever tweet: 24 characters, including spaces. Timestamp, source, and author.

All simple and easy — the marked difference from Facebook or other social networks that offered multiple options, full media, and unlimited status update lengths. And that very difference was a big piece of Twitter’s brand story and attraction to users.

Much of that simplicity has disappeared as Twitter has evolved into a personalized news network — the interest graph rather than the social graph — and incorporated images, video, and short previews of links in expanded tweets for favored partners.

In short, this has happened as Twitter has become more publisher than utility, and as Twitter gets all grown up into a corporation that needs to (shockers) generate revenue.

But with Twitter’s recently announced API changes, developers who integrate with Twitter and incorporate tweets into their apps no longer have display guidelines. They have display rules, and that means that there will soon be at least 32 Laws of the Tweet that developers need to obey … or risk losing their access to the Twitter API and the Twitter ecosystem.

Here they are:

1. Tweeter’s name must be displayed
2. Tweeter’s username must be displayed
3. Tweeter’s avatar must be shown
4. The username must always be displayed with the “@” symbol
5. Tweet text must be shown on a line below the author’s name and username
6. Tweet text must not be altered or modified in any way
7. Any mentions of other Twitter users using “@” must link to those profiles
8. Any hashtags must link to Twitter search for that tag
9. Any links must use the API URL field
10. Any links must use the Twitter shortener t.co
11. Reply …
12. Retweet …
13. and Favorite action icons must be visible for the user …
14. and the relevant actions must be enabled via API or Twitters web intents technology
15. No additional social or third party actions may be attached to a tweet
16. The tweet timestamp must always be visible
17. The tweet timestamp must always be linked to the tweet permalink on Twitter.com
18. The branding must clearly be Twitter’s
19. The Twitter logo or follow button for the tweet author must always be displayed in the top right corner
20. Any pics or images must be displayed as part of the tweet …
21. and link back to the Tweet permalink
22. Images may not be detached from the tweet and displayed separately
23. The user’s name and Twitter username must be displayed on one line
24. The user’s icon must be to the left of the name and tweet text
25. Timestamps should be in the top right corner
26. Use a short-form timestamp in …
27. seconds if the tweet is less than a minute old …
28. minutes if the tweet is less than an hour old …
29. hours if the tweet is less than 24 hours old
30. Use a date and month timestamp if the tweet is more than 24 hours old
31. If the tweet is a retweet, the name of the retweeter and the retweeter icon must be displayed under the tweet
32. No third-party content can be mixed in with Tweet content

This is the example tweet that Twitter included with the list of requirements, which seems to obey them:

Source: Twitter

Twitter example third-party tweet use

Of course, here’s the official Twitter app on iPhone, directly from Twitter. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether or not tweets shown in Twitter’s own app follow the rules:

Source: John Koetsier

Twitter app screenshot

There’s a good reason why they don’t: Tweets that include all the voluminous information that Twitter is requiring developers to display will simply not be as simple, as clean, as readable … in short, as user-friendly as the Tweets shown just above in Twitter’s iPhone app.

Ergo: Third-party developer’s apps will not be as good as Twitter’s.

I should be clear: Twitter is under no obligation to make life easy or lucrative for developers. The company can do as it pleases and when it pleases, and it is only accountable to its investors and the law. Specifically, it can require different things from developers than it offers to users via its own apps.

However, when developers cannot easily and quickly build products of utility, beauty, and simplicity on a software platform, they can and often do choose to abandon that platform. As one developer replied to my initial post about the Twitter development guidelines:

Screw you, Twitter. You just saved me some development time, because I’m not going to suck up to a service that will arbitrarily waste it.

That’s something for Twitter to think hard about as the company continues to monetize. No platform that is not good for developers is likely to succeed in the long term.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photo pin cc

Note:
The guidelines (they will be rules when the API reaches version 1.1) are not presented as above but grouped for easier reading. I’ve separated some that seem to be different specific actions required by developers, but kept others together that seemed too trivial to separate.

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One thing is certain: The changes will affect some of your favorite apps, such as InstaPaper:

I suspect that I’ll have to remove Twitter from most of Instapaper’s “Liked By Friends” functionality.

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 16, 2012

First, the key changes:

Authentication
To minimize bots and scraping of Twitter content, authentication will be required for each and every API request. In other words, Twitter needs to know about you — and authorize you — before you can get data from the Twitter API.

Fewer retweets and fewer followers, but more datapoints
Currently Twitter limits the number of free accesses to its API to 350 calls per hour, whether the requesting site is looking for a tweet, a profile, a user, or a search. In the future, Twitter will implement per-endpoint rate limiting: 60 calls per hour.

If I’m understanding that right, you can get only 60 calls for certain API functions that take more system resources. Twitter’s post does not specify, but it seems that calls like getting the status of retweets on a post, or getting a list of followers for a particular user, would fall into this category.

For those high volume endpoints, such as tweets, profiles, user lookups, and user searches, Twitter will allow up to a maximum of 720 calls per hour.

Full details on these rate limits will be announced later, but it seems clear that Twitter is giving with one hand and taking back with the other. You can have more simple calls; you will presumably need to pay for complex API calls if you want more than 60 an hour.

Display guidelines: Before it was please, now it’s Thou Shalt
Twitter has had display guidelines in place for some time. Now, they’re not guidelines anymore … they are requirements.

Examples include linking @usernames to Twitter profiles and showing standard Twitter actions such as retweet, reply, and favorite. If you fail to comply, Twitter may just revoke your application key.

It’s the C-word: Certification
No more Wild Wild West with Twitter clients. If you want to build a Twitter client for a mobile platform or any other electronic device (such as a smart TV), you’ll need to have your application certified by Twitter. The goal is quality. “We want to make sure that the developer is providing the best Twitter experience possible.” But the result is lockdown.

If Twitter doesn’t like you, tough nuts. And if you do not certify your embedded software, Twitter “reserves the right” to revoke your application key.

Big boys: Talk to the hand
If you have a big app that wants big data, Twitter wants to talk to you. You’ll need permission to access the streams and messages of more than 100,000 individual Twitter users. If you are already doing so, having jumped the queue and built your application when Twitter was more concerned with growth than with control, you may continue, but the cut-off point is 200 percent more users than you currently have.

It’s the classic “them that has, gets,” but at least it’s similar runway for all third-party developers on a percentage basis.

But if you’re just accessing users for data purposes and not providing an application that enables Twitter-like interactions in a third-party app, you’ll be able to access up to 1,000,000 individual users.

Want more? Talk to Twitter, who will guide you “toward areas of value for users and their businesses.”

You’ve got six months
The API migration period is six months, during which time developers will need to migrate their applications from version 1.0. to the new version, 1.1. If you’re already a good boy and only making authenticated calls, this will be simple, says Twitter.

If not, good luck. You will need to start making authenticated calls, and since you probably have a reason for not doing so in the first place, your content-scraping business may be toast. Or your extremely legit app that Twitter just doesn’t like.

And what’s the goal, you ask?
Twitter wants to encourage innovation in the business and analytics side of the business. That’s one of the reasons for the 1 million user rate limit for apps that are not accessing the actual streams of individual users for content creation as well as consumption purposes.

Here’s how Twitter views the third-party app industry:

Twitter wants innovation from others on the left side of the entire chart: business analytics tools like DataMinr, and business engagement apps like HootSuite. And it wants innovation from others on the bottom right quadrant: consumer analytics like Klout.

But consumer engagement — the quadrant where people interact with their interest graph — that is sacred Twitter territory. That is the public face of Twitter to its hundreds of millions of users, and that is Twitter’s brand. Venture there with caution, because Twitter claims that space:

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly 18 months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

Which all gives a pretty big clue to how Twitter is planning to monetize.

Data in the three green-light-go quadrants is metered and controlled and can easily be charged for per 1,000 API calls or whatever. And consumer attention will be monetized with native ads, promoted tweets, and the like.

It’s all in the map.

photo credits: CarbonNYC/Flickr,  ~Ilse via photo pin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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