Burning Hot: June 2007

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TopCoder Live Webcast Today
AOL, who now have 10 open APIs listed here, are live webcasting later today the 2007 TopCoder Open from the Mirage Resort in Las Vegas. This has been called the major league of programming competitions with $260,000 in prizes and about 4,600 developers orginally entered worldwide. See it live at 4pm ET today at dev.aol.com [...]

AOL, who now have 10 open APIs listed here, are live webcasting later today the 2007 TopCoder Open from the Mirage Resort in Las Vegas. This has been called the major league of programming competitions with $260,000 in prizes and about 4,600 developers orginally entered worldwide.

See it live at 4pm ET today at dev.aol.com and watch the webcast hosted by ESPNâ??s Jeremy Schaap. And you can check-out this preview video on their site as well.

Lat49 to Help Monetize Map Mashups
One of the primary issues facing map mashup developers isnâ??t a technical one but a business one: how to make money from their mashups. Often youâ??ll see Google AdSense ads ringing a mashup as basic strategy for generating a bit of revenue. This problem is one that IDELIX Software, a veteran Canadian developer of visualization [...]

Lat49 One of the primary issues facing map mashup developers isnâ??t a technical one but a business one: how to make money from their mashups. Often youâ??ll see Google AdSense ads ringing a mashup as basic strategy for generating a bit of revenue. This problem is one that IDELIX Software, a veteran Canadian developer of visualization tools, is aiming to solve with their new product Lat49.

What is it? Itâ??s a new map-based advertising model targeted directly at this class of online, Ajax-based map applications. Publishers (mashup developers) in addition to using the usual map APIs from Google, Yahoo and others can use a JavaScript API from Lat49 to drive contextually relevant ads. The ads can appear directly within or outside the map. Whatâ??s interesting is how the ads can dynamically change as users drag the map around as well as vary based upon their zoom level.

Lat49

Overall the problems they want to solve for mashup developers in this situation are: screen real estate â?? maps are often forced to be smaller in order to make room for ads; ad relevancy â?? the limited amount of text on map-centric page reduces the text usually used to drive ad relevancy algorithms; and lack of ad refreshes â?? due to Ajax-driven sites that lack the old page reload model.

On the advertisers side, they â??leaseâ?? space by the â??tileâ?? of land. Ads can be specified at four different zoom levels ranging from Local, Neighborhood, Urban, to Brand. Pricing and revenue sharing models are being ironed-out now. I spoke with their team yesterday and theyâ??re looking for publishers and advertisers to take part in their current alpha testing and you get their contact information from their site.

13 Video APIs
With the very recent addition of APIs from video services Veoh and LiveVideo there are now 13 video-related APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb. Some youâ??re more likely to be familiar with like the YouTube API, the Revver API, the Yahoo Video Search API and the AOL Video API. Others include the Dave.TV, the Blinkx API and [...]

Digg Mashup Contest Winners
Digg has announced the winners of the Digg API Visualization Contest. You can read about them here on Digg. Ten finalists were selected by the contest team and then Digg community members used their diggs to vote for the winners. The winner? Digg City, shows the 10 newest popular stories. The more popular the story [...]

Digg has announced the winners of the Digg API Visualization Contest. You can read about them here on Digg. Ten finalists were selected by the contest team and then Digg community members used their diggs to vote for the winners. The winner? Digg City, shows the 10 newest popular stories. The more popular the story gets, the taller the building. When someone diggs the story a stick figure of that user is added. Figure goes inside the building he has just Dugg.

You can see the second and third place winners in our earlier coverage here and see the Digg API Profile here.

New APIs: Widgets, Travel and Patents
Here are a few of the more interesting new APIs added to our API listings in the past week. They are top quality entrants in popular categories â?? our listings include 54 mapping-related APIs, 15 widget-related APIs, and 11 APIs tagged â??governmentâ??.ClearSpring API: The folks at widget creation, deployment and tracking service ClearSpring have been [...]
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/06/26/new-apis-widgets-travel-and-patents/feed/

eBay Tops Web 2.0 Developer Survey
eBay topped five other leading Web 2.0 developer programs including Yahoo, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Microsoft in a study published this month by Evans Data Corporation. The 34 page report entitled â??Developerâ??s Choice: Web 2.0 Developer Programsâ?? is based on a recent survey of 400 developers and is available at the EDC site, free registration [...]

eBay topped five other leading Web 2.0 developer programs including Yahoo, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Microsoft in a study published this month by Evans Data Corporation. The 34 page report entitled â??Developerâ??s Choice: Web 2.0 Developer Programsâ?? is based on a recent survey of 400 developers and is available at the EDC site, free registration required. For readers interested in this space itâ??s a worthwhile read. Some highlights:

Developers were asked about a range of factors including API functionality, developer support, documentation, certification, marketing assistance, security, downtime, solutions directories and tools.
The best overall rating went to eBay followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and PayPal respectively.
Even within a single providerâ??s program there was a wide range of satisfaction. For example Yahoo and Microsoft scored well in forums and blogs while PayPal and Amazon rated lower on these.
The financial benefits a program offers makes a big difference with eBay and Amazon scoring well here.

Hereâ??s a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses by vendor:

PayPal: Scored highest on security but did not fare well on forums and developer community.
Amazon: Scored highly on financial benefits but respondents gave Amazon lower marks on documentation and outages, which EDC notes is surprising and indeed may be a symptom of expectations more than anything else.
eBay: Had the most problems with outages and downtime as well as integration difficulty. They scored highly on financial benefits, support and documentation. Their APIs were voted best of the group.
Google: Rates well for ease of integration, good uptime, and tools. Google scored lower on financial benefit and in the middle on many of the metrics.
Yahoo: Scored highest in terms of ongoing communication and reasonably well on their APIs and their community services like forums. Yahoo is seen less highly in terms of helping developers make money.
Microsoft: Scored well on their developer community programs and tools but not so well on integration, direct financial benefit or marketing assistance.

Best Mashups: Geo Trivia, IP Hacks, Firefox
Following-up on the most recent best-of roundups including 3D UFOs and Twitter, YouTube and Last.fm mashups, here are some more interesting mashups from the newest mashups listed:What if I walk the world in a straight line?: Imagine where you pass if you take a long walk in a straight line around the world, which places [...]

Best Mashups: 3D UFOs, Skype and Twitter
Keeping up with whatâ??s new on the mashup front, here is a roundup of some of the more interesting new mashups:Skype to-and-from Twitter: A mashup to allow you to post Twitters from Skype and receive your friends Twitter timeline into Skype.Moonplex 3D: This Flash-based app lets you upload a photo of your house to see [...]

New APIs: Videos, Photos and Phones
A few new entries of the 453 listed here cover video, photos-plus-maps, and purchasing phone services. Note that video APIs continue to proliferate, there are now 12 APIs tagged video in our listings. Here are more details on the new APIs:Panoramio API: This Spanish service lets users geolocate, store and organize their photographs and to [...]

Etelos as SMB Platform
While most of the news in the enterprise SaaS space is often generated by Salesforce.com, another smaller but very interesting player is Etelos who offer a general-purpose multi-tenant application platform designed for the SMB market. Their strategy is to help those companies and the thousands of ISVs that serve them to have a fully hosted, [...]