Earlier this week Microsoft announced that it is making some of the imagery used in its Virtual Earth platform available for purchase (more on Virtual Earth in our VE SDK profile). The imagery, taken with Microsoft’s proprietary UltraCam shown below is available for approximately 200 cities (in high resolution and averaging less than two years old).
This week our API directory crossed another threshold — now with 900 open web service APIs listed. 2008 has been a busy year for new APIs, first averaging 40 APIs per month in Q1 and then up to 60 new web service APIs just last month alone.
Map mashups continue to mature in terms of sophistication and functionality, providing end users with an ever-expanding set of tools and applications. As a result, the intersection between traditional geospatial data and these new mashups requires well defined ways to transfer, distribute, and consume geospatial data in a web-friendly way.
Technology blogger Mohamed Marwen Meddah wrote an interesting post recently on his StartUpArabia site: “The Importance of Having An API for Arab Startups”. Mohamed notes that, thus far, relatively few Arab online startups have opened up their platforms through APIs. However, he believes that providing an API is crucial for Arab online services.
12seconds.tv has released the first version of its API, allowing developers to integrate the service, which lets users record “video status” updates no longer than 12 seconds, directly into their own sites. Their new REST API is currently only read-only, providing methods to retrieve a user’s video or their “friend stream,” get information about a specific video (including its playback URL), and search videos by tag. More technical details at our 12secods.tv API profile.
Late last week Google announced the release of a new Geolocation APIfor its Google Gears browser extension (our new Gears Geolocation API Profile).
Last week message-scheduling service Sendible announced version 1.0 of its API. You can find more technical details at our Sendible API profile.
As the various offerings by mapping API providers continue to mature, new opportunities have emerged for would-be advertisers and map mashup developers to tap into the ability to include advertising directly on a map. In addition to providing a wealth of information and spatial context, mapping APIs have the potential to serve as an additional venue for advertising.
Daylife has announced the winners of the 2008 DayPI Developer Challenge. Their DayPI is a unique API for building news-based applications. We wrote about the DayPI Developer Challenge last month.
Last month we welcomed the new NPR API from National Public Radio (NPR), an internationally acclaimed media production and distribution non-profit best known for a wide array of non-commercial radio programs. Now they want your input on the next release.
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