Kin Lane

Diving Deeper Into Data from Research

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:57:15 PDT

I was reading a report commissioned by Google and conducted by Ipsos MediaCT in partnership with the Mobile Marketing Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, called Our Mobile Planet.

You can find the report at OurMobilePlanet.com. Included with the report on the mobile consumer, the site provides access to the full set of data from the research through a chart creation tool or the direct download of full country level data files.

The report is very informative, but the real story is how the report is published. It is a complete site, report, reporting tools and full access to the data. This is nothing new. Its something The Guardian does well in the context of data-driven journalism.

When it comes to research I think it should become the standard. If you create a report, you should have to not only publish the report, you should provide interactive tools allowing non-developers to derive their own visualizations as well as raw data access for those who really want to dive deeper.

I think many companies who commission research are fine with just publishing the final results. I feel pretty strongly that the next generation of research MUST have data visualization tools bundled with the report, as well as access to raw data so others can validate findings or take it in a potentially new direction.

Business and Politics of APIs

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:24:32 PDT

This summer its been 2 years since I started API Evangelist. API Evangelist started as my research project into the Business of APIs, and became a full time career.

While over the last two years I’ve worked for clients like Mimeo and CityGrid, my ultimate goal is to focus on studying the Business of APIs. So whenever I get the time, I study how popular APIs operate, and how they are transforming industries.

This month, I’m getting the opportunity to dive deeper into my research around different API business models, with the chance to look at the politics within specific API ecosystems.

While my research will always span the entire API sector, this round I’m going to study the approach of some of the most successful APIs:

Twitter - Deep understanding of the largest, and most important API ecosystem
Facebook - Better understanding of the largest API driven social platform
Google - Document the 100 or so APIs offered by Google, and the platform that connects them
LinkedIn - Better picture of the leading business social network platform
Amazon - Document the history of this API pioneer
Twilio - Understand how Twilio continues to deliver their API, and woo developers

I’m going to begin by analyzing the business and politics of Twitters API ecosystem, and as more funding comes through I’ll focus on the other APis. While studying each API I look at:

Historical company blog posts, tweets and press releases
Historical blog posts and tweets from the blogosphere and developers

I organize all my research into a curation framework I’ve developed and will be generating:

Timeline - A easy to navigate, timeline of the APIs history through curated blog posts, tweets and company announcments.
Blog Posts - Single and series of blog posts documenting the business and politics of each API provider.
Final Paper(s) - Each project will have at least one final white-paper with findings from the research.
Raw Research - A searchable repository of curated research and notes from my work.

Then making this work available across both apievangelist.com and my new blog apivoice.com, which tends to focus on the politics of APIs including legal and other issues affecting developer ecosystems.

I feel pretty strongly that this new round of research will help me better understand the business and politics of APIs, produce rich research, stories and industry reports that I can make available--helping us all better understand this ever changing API economy.

If you'd like to get involved and fund any portion of this research, feel free to contact me.

Tools of the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:54:05 PDT

We have a pretty awesome line-up of tools, platforms and APIs for people to use when building their local web and mobile apps this weekend at the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon:

3Scale (@3Scale) - A Plug & Play Cloud based API Management Infrastructure for Developers, Startups, SMBs and Enterprises to securely open, control, manage and monetize their API to 3rd parties.
CityGrid (@CityGridAPITeam) - Places, offers, reviews APIs and mobile, web and custom advertising with places that pay.
CloudyRec (@Cloudyrec) - CloudyRec is a mobile app scaffolding engine with integrated Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS).
Factual (@Factual) - Places, Products, Health, Education, Government and Entertainment accessible via database and API, with a Resolve API providing places intelligence and Crosswalk API identifying places across multiple systems like Foursquare, Yelp and Facebook.
GeoCoda (@GeocodaHQ) - Simple Geocoding API providing information about any U.S. address via an HTTP API, and a spatial database to store and manage location-based information.
IPGP (@IPlookup) - IPGP is a site that lets users lookup the location of their site's visitors based on their IP addresses.
Iron.io (@Getiron) - Iron.io provides massively scalable cloud application services: IronWorker, a massively parallel worker platform and IronMQ is an elastic message queue as a service.
Jeppesen (@JeppesenJP) - Jeppesen Journey Planner is a cost effective way to integrate public transit information into your own website or mobile application.
Socrata (@Socrata)- Open Data Services for federal, state, and local governments to dramatically improve the reach, usability and social utility of their public information assets.
Spire.io (@Spireio) - A real-time messaging service as the first in a set of hosted, secure, and scalable APIs built for mobile and web application development.
Tiggzi (@tiggziapps) - Cloud-based Builder for HTML5, jQuery Mobile, and PhoneGap Apps, allowing connection to REST APIs, and Export for Android, iOS, or Mobile Web.
Verious (@Veriously) - A marketplace for mobile application components, enabling iOS and Android developers to license pre-built, pre-tested libraries to accelerate time-to-market, access 3rd-party platforms and increase in-app monetization.

The CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon is sold out, but you can follow the event on Twitter using the hashtag #citygridhackathonLA.

Supporting Encrypted Cloud Storage for Modern Web Languages

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:38:56 PDT

As more of our lives move online, into the clouds, encrypted backup and storage of not just our vital data, but our personal photos, files and streams is becoming critical--this responsibility to provide secure cloud storage and backup solutions is up to developers of the software, people use every day.

IDrive is working to provide these solutions for developers by delivering two interfaces for developers to integrate encrypted storage into their applications:

Command Line Utility - Develop highly scalable, reliable and fast applications to manage your storage on IDrive EVS. Best for desktop applications and also ideal for CRON jobs.
REST APIs - An interface designed to allow developers to easily build web and mobile applications to manage storage on IDrive EVS.

To help support our REST APIs users, IDrive has developed three new libraries supporting modern web languages:

Using these libraries, web and mobile applications developers can provide secure cloud storage and back-up, that works with the IDrive platform. In addition to providing users with secure storage within their own apps, developers can also leverage the entire IDrive ecosystem of consumer web and mobile tools already developed for users to manage their data.

There is no reason to leave users data unencrypted, while storing in the cloud, something security experts warn everyone about, but developers can only do with IDrive. Take advantage of the IDrive web client libraries, and use a secure REST API for storing and backing up files in your PHP, Python or Ruby web application.

Delivery Encrypted Cloud Storage for Ruby Applications

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:35:00 PDT

IDrive just finished a set of Ruby samples complete with full library you can use when developing your encrypted, versioned cloud storage for your web application, using IDrive EVS REST API.

With the introduction of the web application framework Rails, the popularity of Ruby for building web apps has skyrocketed. To support Ruby developers, IDrive has added samples to each of the 19 REST API Methods:

You can also visit the download center, where you will find links to Github repositories containing entire Ruby libraries for integrating your web application with all the functionality available via the IDrive EVS REST API.

Using IDrive EVS, Ruby developers can deliver encrypted storage and backup within their web applications, providing security and privacy not available with Amazon S3 and other cloud providers.

Encrypted Cloud Storage with Python

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:27:34 PDT

IDrive now has a set of Python samples complete with full library you can use when developing your encrypted, versioned cloud storage for your web application.

Python is one of the fastest growing, interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language--embraced by giants like Google. IDrive has added samples to each of the 19 REST API Methods:

You can also visit the download center, where you will find links to Github repositories containing entire Python libraries for integrating your web application with all the functionality available via the IDrive EVS REST API.

As more of our daily lives move online, encrypted backup and storage will be critical to Python developers, building the next generation of secure web applications in the cloud. Take advantage of the IDrive EVS platform for securing your users data storage and backup.

Build Secure, Encrypted Cloud Storage Solutions with PHP

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:01:23 PDT

IDrive now has PHP samples complete with full library you can use when developing your encrypted, versioned cloud storage for your software solution.

PHP is widely is in many web applications today, so it’s a language we couldn’t ignore. We’ve added samples to each of the 19 REST API Methods:

You can also visit the download center, where you will find links to Github repositories containing entire PHP libraries for integrating your web application with all the functionality available via the IDrive EVS REST API.

IDrive is the only fully encrypted cloud backup and storage provider, which is a huge opportunity for PHP developers to deliver secure storage and backup for their users.

Turn Your Wordpress Blog into Mobile City Guide

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:02:47 PDT

I'm always on the lookout for tools that CityGrid publishers can use alongside the web and mobile apps they've built using CityGrid Places and Advertising APIs.

Today I came across a cool Wordpress plugin over at WP Mayor, a site for WordPress news, articles, hacks and plugin reviews, that turns your local blog into an iPhone enabled city guide, called Placeling.

To get started, Placeling provides an iPhone app that allows you to mark places that you've been, which will provide the reference for blog posts that you write later. Next you install and activate the Placeling plugin in your Worpress site. You'll notice that now, when you write a blog post you'll see a marketer next to the upload photo button, and a new box called "Placeling" below the main editor.

The first time you do this, you'll be asked to login to Placeling, which will give you access to the places that you’ve marked using the Placeling iPhone application. No you have access to all the places you’ve been, linking them to the blog posts your writing on the places and things you’ve seen.

Each blog that is linked up to your Placeling places will be available via the Placeling iPhone app for other people, showing a summary you provide and a link to your blog post. The Wordpress plugin automatically appends the Placeling logo to the footer of your blog post, giving credit to Placeling and completing the local places blogging network they are working to build.

I think Placeling is a creative approach to linking up local content to places, in a very hyperlocal way. It shows a lot of promise if you can come up with ways to incentivize local bloggers to link their content to the network, and potentially monetize with places that pay and advertising.

Article Source Credit - Introducing Placeling: Turn Your Blog Into an iPhone-based City Guide

CityGrid LA Hackathon

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:24:12 PDT

The future of the World Wide Web is local. As we spend more of our lives on our mobile phones, local data and apps become critical in helping us find the restaurant for a lunch meeting, the bar where our best friends are Friday night, the local retail store to make our next purchase, and to interact with our city government to make the cities we live in a better place.

You can help shape the future of local, with the CityGrid LA Hackathon, a creative, local innovation event bringing together developers, local marketers, local advertisers and even local merchants to help build applications, data visualizations and other creative technology that helps define the future of local.

Event Title - CityGrid LA Hackathon
Event Location - CoLoft - 920 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90401
Dates / Times - 4/27/2012 6:00 PM to 4/29/2012 6:00 PM
Event Focus - Build any local web or mobile application or data visualization

The CityGrid Hackathon is meant to bring together commercial and civic hackers to build the next generation of apps we’ll use in our everyday local lives.

Prizes for the Hackathon are:

1st Prize - $5,000.00
2nd Prize - $2,500.00
3rd Prize - $1,000.00

Prizes are not linked to any particular API or tool, but are awarded to the most innovative approach to a mobile or web app, or visualization that is focused locally. Judging will be conducted via Twitter, so bring your Tweeps to the event and make sure they support you.

The event starts Friday night 4/27/2012 at 6PM to kick off the event and continue through Sunday 4/29/2012 with hacking completing at 3:00 PM and winners announced at 5:00 PM. Food and drink will be provided throughout the weekend, so come hack (even if you are not a developer), and help make our cities a better place to live!

The CityGrid LA hackathon is the first of 9 local hackathons in different cities including Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, NYC, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Austin. If you’d like to be a sponsors, attendee or would like to help organize a CityGrid hackathon in your city, contact us:

Contact - Kin Lane
Phone - (541) 357-9073
Email - kin.lane@citygridmedia.com
Twitter - @citygridapiteam
Hashtag - #citygridhackathonLA
Registration - Register Now!

CityGrid Local, Mobile Stack: Urban Airship

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:57:45 PDT

Urban Airship came out with some new push notification tools this week, including services that allow you to slice-and-dice your mobile application audiences by location, time, context and preference--allowing you to improve the relevancy and targeting of messages and offers.

Some examples they give are:

a national retailer could off-load excess inventory held by various stores by targeting offers to people in those cities or multiple ZIP codes that have a preference for that product category.
a sports or entertainment venue could target people that are nearby right now to drive attendance on a slow day, or offer longer-term promotions for people that were visitors within the last six months but not in the prior three months.
a media site could define custom segments called Travelers or Movers based on changes in cities, states or countries over time, and bolster its breaking news pushes with useful local content.

The new Urban Airship products are Push and Rich Push® composers, allowing users to construct targeted segments that join location information with in-app behaviors, preferences and device profiles.

“As an always-on-you device, smart-phones and apps offer the ability to accurately know where people are and what they care about, but too often marketers cast a wide net using only snapshots of insight,” said Scott Kveton, CEO and co-founder, Urban Airship. “In ignoring individuals’ context and behavior over time, marketers risk losing the privilege of leveraging the most intimate communications channel available.”

The entire Urban Airship platform which now includes Push Notifications, Rich Push, Push Composer, In-App Purchase, Subscriptions and Reports, has API access for developers, including iOS and Android libraries ready to go.

I’m adding Urban Airship to the CityGrid Local, Mobile Stack and will be weaving more of their services into what we offer here in the CityGrid Developer Center as well as our hackathon tools.

New CityGrid Template for Wordpress Search Plugin

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:56:27 PDT

I pushed an update for the CityGrid Wordpress Directory Plugin earlier today. I finished porting over the changes to the CityGrid Wordpress Search Plugin as well.

Both my Wordpress plugins had a pretty basic look and feel, I wanted them to look better. So using the HTML and CSS template I borrowed from CityGrid I added it to both of the CityGrid Wordpress Plugins to make them look sharper.

So now both the CityGrid Wordpress Directory Plugin and CityGrid Wordpress Search Plugin have a default UI template, as well as the ability to switch it and make it look like CityGrid.com.

Next I’m going to add another template or two, then start extending the functionality of each template, allowing Wordpress site owners to have as much flexibility when deploying business search or directories using CityGrid Places API.

Socrata Releases New Cloud-Based Mapping Solution Mondara

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:54:33 PDT

The open data platform Socrata just released a new cloud mapping software called Mondara, designed for users with no GIS expertise, allowing them to build online maps from existing data Shapefile or KML files.

While Shapefiles or KML files are probably still pretty technical for most users, with Mondara any users can upload existing spreadsheets containing address information, and turn them into online maps.

Mondara provides an online interface for creating maps with existing data, as well as enabling users to add, managing and combine layers within the a map, providing a lot of detail about your location data.

Once you create a map you can easily export the map in multiple formats including KML, KMZ and Shapefile, as well as share anywhere with Youtube like embedding.

It’s an interesting new cloud mapping service priced at $499/month allowing you to create up to 100 online maps.

I’m curious to see how the mapping service works with the open data Socrata has helped cities like NYC, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin and New Orleans publish online.

At first glance, Mondara looks like a slick tool for all of us non-mapping professionals help make sense of, and communicate the message available in this flood of big data we see coming out of our municipal governments.

New CityGrid Template for Wordpress Directory Plugin

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:48:37 PDT

I just pushed an update for the CityGrid Wordpress Directory Plugin. The Wordpress Plugin lets any Wordpress site owner to launch a business directory for their site, allowing them to choose the business categories they wish to display.

For example, if you want to show pizza, burgers, seafood and chinese food in your neighborhood you can launch the plugin, choose your categories, enter your city, neighborhood or zip code and it automatically adds a directory to your menu with the categories you wish to display.

The plugin has been around for a month, but it had a pretty basic look and feel, I wanted it to look better. Last week took the HTML and CSS template for CityGrid, cleaned it up and turned it into a template for any developer to use when deploying a local web directory.

I want my Wordpress users to take advantage of this, so this week I added it to the CityGrid Wordpress Directory Plugin. While doing this I also added a framework, allowing users to choose from multiple templates, meaning I will be adding more UI templates in the future.

I am almost done, adding the same template to the CityGrid Wordpress Local Search Plugin today and committing the changes for everyone to take advantage of.

CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack: Verizon Mapkit API

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:58:59 PST

I’m spending more time building, what I’ve dubbed the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack, a list of APIs, platforms and tools that you can use in your local-mobile applications. With the latest move by Foursquare to join the OpenStreetMaps movement, I’m focused on finding the best mapping tools for the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack.

First on my list of alternative mapping solutions is Verizon Mapkit API, which provides location-based services that include maps, search, traffic and static directions. The Verizon Mapkit API is centered on a map object that provides a tile-based solution supporting multiple layers such road map/satellite/hybrid, traffic, and routes--with built-in controls for standard map operations such as panning and zooming using the host device’s native gestures.

The MapKit also provides a full set of search APIs delivering geocoding, geolocation and access to local content:

Address Search (Geocoding)
Reverse Geocoding
Local Search
Fuel Price Search
Movie Theaters
Movie Show-Times
Events
Event Venues
Traffic Incidents
Static Directions

The Verizon Mapkit API does not have a web API currently, but does support native application development on Android, iOS, Blackberry and Brew MP platforms. At first glance you may think the mapping solution is just for Verizon devices, but it can be used across multiple platforms.

The Verizon Mapkit API is a perfect addition to the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack. They offer a robust mapping platform that native mobile apps can take advantage of. The Mapkit API is part of the Verizon NavBuilder Inside LBS SDK, which comes with other APIs and tools I will be adding to the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack in future blog posts.

Mobile Advertising Platform Round-Up

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:27:35 PST

I’m doing more research for my Local, Mobile, Social Stack, and spending some time understanding the mobile advertising space.

So far I’ve found 24 mobile advertising platforms:

Adfonic - Global mobile advertising marketplace
AdMob - Tools to promote, measure and monetize mobile apps
Admoda - Global mobile advertising marketplace
BuzzCity - Global mobile advertising network
Chitika - Online Web and Mobile Advertising Network
CityGrid Custom Ads API - The raw, parts and pieces of local advertisements
CityGrid Mobile Ads API - Local mobile advertising network
Google Mobile Ads - Mobile advertising network
GreyStripe - Brand-focused mobile advertising network
Hunt Mobile Ads - Mobile advertising platform
InMobi - Mobile advertising platform
Inneractive - Mobile app monetization exchange
Jumptap - Targeted mobile advertising
Madvertise - Global mobile advertising network
Microsoft Mobile Advertising - MSN Advertising Network
Millennial Media - mobile advertising & data platform
Mojiva - Global mobile advertising network
Mobclix - Real-Time Bidding mobile ad exchange
Mobile Theory - Mobile advertising network
NAVTEQ Media Solutions - Location based, mobile advertising network
Rvolve Hyperlocal Ads - Hyperlocal advertising platform
Smaato - mobile advertising optimization platform
xAd - Mobile advertising service

This is is just a round-up, next I will profile what each of the mobile advertising providers offer and see how the CityGrid advertising network compares.

Many of these networks offer mobile advertising for the entire world, beyond the local advertising space, but I want to see as many of the providers as I can.

Stayed tuned for more detail on mobile advertising as part of the CityGrid local, mobile, social stack.

Business Directory for your Local Wordpress Blog or Site

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:05:41 PST

I finished the first version of a business directory WordPress plugin that you can use to deploy a local directory for your Wordpress site or blog. I wanted to make an easy way for non-developers, to launch a local directory for one or multiple business categories.

The Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin uses two APIs:

To install the CityGrid Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin you have two options:

Search for it and install using the Plugin Search in your Wordpress site (this is the easiest).
Download it from the Wordpress plugin directory or via Github, and upload using the "plugin upload" in your Wordpress site.

Once installed you should see a new menu in your Wordpress admin menu, called CityGrid. It contains an overview of the plugin and a setting page for configuring your Wordpress directory.

Using the settings page you can configure five elements of your local business directory:

CityGrid Publisher Code - The API key that gives you access to CityGrid business data.
Directory Label - What your directory will be called on your sites menu.
Where - A location of "where" you want to provide a search for, this can include: Cities, Neighborhoods, Zip Codes, Metro Areas, Addresses and Intersections.
What - Keywords separated by commas (pizza, pubs, hair salon, auto parts). Each keyword or phrase will create new page and directory.
Ads - Whether or not you want to show ads on your site.

I tried to find strike a balance between simplicity, while also giving site owners a very robust local directory for their site. My goal is to empower non-developers with the ability to launch local business directories for any topic or geographic location at a city level.

This is just version 1.0 of the CityGrid Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin, so if you find problems, or there are things you would like to see in future versions, please tweet your feedback @citygridapiteam or leave comments on the CityGrid Dev Talk Forum.

CityGrid Places API with Hyp3r0cal for Wordpress

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:39:58 PST

I wanted a way to make the rich content available via CityGrid APIs accessible to anyone, even if you weren't a developer.

CityGrid has some great iOS and Android software development kits (SDK) available for building local, mobile applications.

I've also built some samples and starter kits for building local web applications in PHP, Python and Ruby.

WordPress seemed like the perfect next step to reach a larger audience, so I took the PHP Hyp3rL0cal directory that uses CityGrid Places API, and deployed it as a Wordpress Plugin.

Now you can launch a quick section on your Wordpress blog or site that allows you to display businesses for your area, in whatever category you wish.

This CityGrid Hyp3rL0cal Wordpress Plugin is meant to be a project that developers can learn from and even deploy their own local WordPress Plugins that use CityGrid APIs. However its completely functional and could be deployed by any non-developer as well.

Right now you can download or fork at Github, as I stabilize it further I will publish to the CityGrid developer center code samples page.

If you have any questions or need help, visit the CityGrid Developer Forums or ping us on Twitter via @citygridapiteam.

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - February 15th, 2012

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:28:14 PST

The best of the blog posts and tweets from Localeze, Acxiom, InfoGroup, Verizon, YPG.com, Yahoo GeoPlanet, Foursquare, Facebook, Google Places, Google Mobile Ads, Google Geo, Simple Geo, Factual, Yelp, Fwix, Infochimps, PlacesIQ, HyperPublic and Placecast for the week. In an effort to keep track of whats going on in the local and geo landscape I track on all of the tweets and blog posts from these providers.

From the Foursquare Blog

Quick Tip: Finding last minute flowers, treats, and date night spots! - (02/14/2012) - Explore on your phoneto find the nearest chocolates, flowers, or cupcakes on the way to your date tonight. (Try searching cozy, romantic, or delicious if youre still looking for a place to go! ) Good luck!
Quick Tip: Find the address in a snap (and some recommendations while youre at it) - (02/13/2012) - If youre using Google Chromeas your browser, you can get super speedy results with this keyboard shortcut trick: 1) Type foursquare. com into the address bar and hit the tab key 2) Type the name of the place and hit enter! Well show you our search results page, including addresses. Click through to see a map, recommendations, photos, and even the menu if the theyve provided the info. Still need to pick a spot? Use foursquare. com/explore to find tons of personalized recommendations for whatever youre craving, based on what you and your friends like.
Sculpture gardens, scenic lookouts, sugary confections planning your Valentines Day with foursquare! - (02/10/2012) - Planning a day date for the weekend? Check out these lists of romantic parks inNorth Carolinaand New York. From planetariums to sculpture parks, this list has romantic spotsacross the country. Who says Valentines Day is for couples only? Browse lists from for fun places to go alone or with your friends in DC, Boston, and New York. Check out these performance venues in Houstonor The Corcoran Groupsrecommendations for theaters and showsin New York. Dont forget to buy tickets! Looking for love? Take some tips from Bravos Millionaire Matchmaker and her suggestions for the perfect datein New Jersey and New York. Make plans to see some of the breathtaking viewsfrom around the world!
How colleges make the world better with foursquare! - (02/09/2012) - The University of Toledo leaves tipsaround campus to let students know where to find all the recycling bins (no more pizza box graveyards in students dorm rooms! ). For their Sustainability Week activities (how awesome is it that they have that? ), the University at Albany-SUNYrewardedstudents and faculty with 10 campus dollars for leaving tips about sustainability for others to discover. For a recent food drive, George Mason Universitycreated a foursquarelistof all the participating drop-off locations accepting canned food, so students all over campus knew where to take their donations. At the University of North Alabama (Go Lions!
Finding places on the go has never been easier check out the new Explore for your phone! - (02/08/2012) - Today, were launching an updated version of Explore for iPhoneand Android, bringing over a bunch of the great features from our recent Explore on the weblaunch straight to your phone, like changing your location, filtering your recommendations, and photos in your search results! Get ready for personalized recommendations for whatever youre craving, wherever and whenever you need them! Smarter searching Every time you search with Explore, well show you results based on the time of day, places your friends have been or left tips, places on lists you follow, and places we think youll like based on the 1,500,000,000 check-ins on foursquare.
City badge winners announced! #visitUS - (02/08/2012) - governors promoted, and celebrity chefstweeted, but in the end, only three cities could win their very own badge. Actually, there were so many awesome lists, we picked five (and it was so hard to narrow it down that far)! Here they are: Baltimore, Maryland With retweets from themayor, the governor, thelieutenant governor, The Good Wifestar Josh Charles, Charm City Cakes, and their Ace of Cakesstar Duff Goldman,Visit Baltimorewon the follower count category with over 1000 followers! Check out their amazing list, featuring everything from the best Thursday night karaoke bar, to the uncanny Frank Zappa Statue. Richmond, Virginia Richmond is for lovers!

From the Facebook Blog

Early Success Stories: Timeline Apps and Open Graph - (02/15/2012) - img. border { border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: #CCCCCC;} There should be an app for everyone on Facebook, and people are quickly starting to use the apps you build to experience all of the things they love shopping, reading books, eating and traveling with their friends. A few weeks ago, more than 60 new timeline apps went live. These apps - many in the lifestyle category - broadened what was available to people on Facebook beyond the music, news and video apps that were introduced at f8 in September. Music apps like Spotify, Songza and Deezer are seeing dramatic increases in sharing and music discovery.
Announcing The Facebook Mobile Platform Global Hacks Roadshow- Europe - (02/13/2012) - In October, we announced the Facebook Mobile Platform, bringing social channels and distribution to mobile apps. Since then, momentum has been building, and today, more than 60 million visitors interact with apps and games on the platform every month. In October we also invited mobile developers to join us for a Mobile Hack in Palo Alto. We later visited mobile developers in New York and Boston to hold similar events. Hundreds joined us at each event, learned about the Facebook Mobile Platform, worked on mobile hack projects, and presented them to panels of VCs and tech executives. We were thrilled that these mobile hack events attracted developers from around the world, from as far afield as London, Israel and Brazil.
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love - (02/10/2012) - This week, we posted blogs on Creating Featured Stories with Action Specs and Developer Blog Subscriptions. Additionally, we invited developers to come talk to us at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco in March. Open Graph "Read" Built-in Action Available in DevApp This week we enabled the built-in Read action in the Open Graph Tool. Like the Watch action or any custom action, you will still have to submit this action for review before you can go live. Please check out the documentation and requirements for Built-in Action Types. New: Best Practices This week we published our first product guide, "Guide: Complete the loop to grow your app with Open Graph.
Payments update - (02/10/2012) - We have a few updates for developers using Payments on Facebook Platform, including updates to the Pay Dialog, payout reports as well as new payer promotions. New Payer Promotions Facebook has begun sponsoring promotions to help developers convert game players into paying users. We are currently running an offer to encourage game players to make a first-time purchase using their credit card or PayPal account. This offers allows the user to earn $4 of value for free by purchasing 10 Facebook Credits at the regular price of $1. Users outside the US will see the same offer expressed in their local currency. There are two versions of this offer currently running on the platform.
Developer Blog Subscriptions - (02/08/2012) - We recently launched the ability to manage your email subscriptions on the Developer Site: A month ago, we discovered a bug in our Developer Blog email subscriptions that prevented posts from getting emailed. We fixed this bug today and sent out all posts that were never delivered. This ensured that you didn't miss any important announcements (some posts dated back to mid-January). We apologize for sending the emails all at once and any confusion that this may have caused. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

From the Google Geo Developers Blog

Fab Friday: Three Quick Links - (02/10/2012) - Google Vector Layers: Google Vector Layers allows you to easily add one or more vector layers from a number of different geo web services to a Google Maps API based application.
Debugging KML Balloon Content in Google Earth - (02/09/2012) - KML Balloons in Google Earth - starting with version 5. 0 - support HTML, CSS, and almost full JavaScript.

Processing Twitter for Factual

(02/15/2012) Great news for Haskell fans. Thanks to @rudyl313 there's now a Haskell driver for the Factual API. http://t.co/L1URmXEm

From the InfoChimps Blog

Infochimps at Strata Conference 2012 - (02/10/2012) - We’re excited to have our CTO, Flip Kromer presenting a talk at Strata Conference in Santa Clara later this month. The discussion centers arounddisambiguation. Now you might be wondering… what is disambiguation? Simply put, disambiguation is the process of resolving conflicts to remove ambiguity. We’ve discussed this topic a number of times in this blog and Flip will be presenting on how this concept affects the way we ask questions and find answers about Big Data. For more details on the talk, check out the Strata schedule.

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Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - February 6th, 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:53:04 PST

From the Facebook Blog

Join the Facebook Platform team at GDC in March - (02/06/2012) - We're excited to announce Facebook Developer Day at Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, March 5th. Conference attendees are invited to join the Facebook Platform team for interactive discussions throughout the day on best practices and pro-tips for building social games. At this all-day event, developers will learn the fundamentals of building successful social games across platforms, including mobile and console, and how to deeply integrate apps with timeline through Open Graph. Register now for an "All-Access" or "Summit & Tutorials" pass to GDC San Francisco to secure your spot at Facebook Developer Day on Monday, March 5th.
Creating Featured Stories with Action Specs - (02/03/2012) - Recently we announced a new way of creating Featured Stories (previously "Sponsored Stories") on the Ads API by using action specs. These changes make the Ads API more flexible and will make it easier for developers to adapt to new story types as we launch them. We will be deprecating the old sponsored stories creative types as of May 1. Prior to this change Sponsored Stories were defined by choosing the correct Ad Creative type for the specific Sponsored Story type. E. g. a page like sponsored story was type 9, a page post like sponsored story was type 17 etc. This made it complicated for developers to incorporate new Sponsored Story types as each Sponsored Story required different fields per story type.
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love - (02/03/2012) - This week, we published a How-To on subscribing to data changes using the Real-time Updates API, as well as a games update on driving more discovery for games and shared Single Sign-On best practices for iOS and Android mobile developers. Lastly we announced a guide on How to Migrate your Application Profile Page. Ability to set the Password on Test Users We have long had a feature on the Developer App to enable you to create a new test user and to switch to it as needed. We've heard that it was still difficult for developers to test their mobile apps. To address this need, we have added the ability to set the password of the a user now from the Developer App.
How-To: Migrate your App Profile Page - (02/01/2012) - In December, we announced that we will be deprecating App Profile Pages on Feburary 1st. Many developers have asked for some tips on how to smoothly migrate their page. Below are some common issues, questions, and pro-tips for how to handle. What happens when users go to my deprecated App Profile Page? We recommend updating any links that you've shared to your App Profile Page to point to your new target Page.

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(02/01/2012) Had a great time sponsoring @StartupWeekend San Jose. Congrats to @dougzor @alexconrad & bzzr.me team for winning our developer prize #swjs

From the InfoChimps Blog

The Rise and Fall of the Fortune 500 - (02/01/2012) - this elegant interactive visualization of publicly available Wikipedia data around the Fortune 500, America's largest corporation. His intent was to show how 84,000 data points could be easily viewed and navigated in one interactive piece. We think he did an amazing job using the clean, simple display to tell rich stories of company histories and the rise and fall of our country's top corporations. One company that stands out in our minds is Eastman Kodak, who enjoyed growing revenues and steady profitability for decades.

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(02/07/2012) RT @paulmiller: My #datamarkets podcast with @mrflip of @infochimps now online. @buzzdata chat will go up Thursday. http://t.co/t28gFH53
(02/06/2012) We're excited about our webcast with @datameer on finding customer insights with Big Data analytics! http://t.co/0HnmnFgr
(02/03/2012) @agbegin That is sweet!
(02/03/2012) Our CTO, @mrflip will be speaking at @StrataConf later this month. Will you be there? http://t.co/ThbbYyFG
(02/01/2012) RT @flowingdata: Mapping the drug wars in Mexico http://t.co/BKg6kFkg

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(02/06/2012) Register to download #Yesmail Interactive's FREE #Lookbook, award winning email/mobile designs http://t.co/yg4YEhoZ
(02/02/2012) How to Make Your Mobile Marketing Succeed in 2012 : Technology :: American Express OPEN Forum http://t.co/wEJ31rpV via @OpenForum
(02/01/2012) How to Pitch Angel Investors : Money :: American Express OPEN Forum http://t.co/dZAiWbr1 via @OpenForum
(02/01/2012) The 7 Fundamentals of Building a Successful Business : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum http://t.co/AnOTU4v9 via @OpenForum

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(02/07/2012) #SherpaEmail attendees: Have you used SMS or QR codes for email list signups? For Yes- Text TWEET A to 64686. For No-Text TWEET B to 64686
(02/06/2012) Join us at #sherpaemail next week! Find out what panels we're participating in & how you can get text alerts http://t.co/Q8XgP8VE
(02/03/2012) @TlaBouff Great to hear, Tara. Which paper did you download? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
(02/01/2012) Are You Competing with Your Own Business Identity? - Search Engine Watch Article by Jeff Beard (#SEW) http://t.co/J4pqxd2z

From the InMobi Blog

Developers' Guide to MWC - (02/06/2012) - Business Cards How many cards were you planning on bringing? Nope - bring twice as many! Make sure you actually do something with the cards you pick up - I like WorldCard for scanning in cards. Pick Up All The Schwag Every company will be handing out free posters, stressballs, branded USB sticks, samples, and - in some cases - giving away phones. Take everything you can lay your hands on. Hand Sanitiser You're going to be shaking hands with thousands of people. Take along a bottle of hand sanitiser to help prevent picking up the MWC lurgy. Throat Lozenges Talking everyone through your app is hard on the vocal chords - especially if you've spent all night at the karaoke!

SEO Friendly, Static Local Directory Without Caching Data

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:55:28 PST

I’m working on several prototypes for building CityGrid local directories, demonstrating best practices when building web and mobile apps using CityGrid APIs. One question I’ve gotten a lot lately is how are developers supposed to build SEO friendly local directories with static pages if they aren’t allowed to cache businesses and places from the CityGrid API?

It is true, per the CityGrid Usage Requirements, you aren’t allowed to store places data in a local database or cache locally. But if you think about this, it isn’t a negative, its a positive. You don’t have to manage the potentially millions of business listings (which isn’t easy), and when a business updates their profile you don’t have to worry about having out of date information.

If you can’t store the data, then how do you build out local directories, with static pages?

To begin I would start with the root of all places search with CityGrid, the what and the where. I recommend building a folder structure that looks like this /where/what/, for example /newyorkcity/pubs/. Then in the root of this folder, put a single index page that parses the folder structure and sets your where and what variables, before making a live search using the CityGrid places API.

Now with the results of your places API search you can list the results for the user to select from. For each business listing you will get back a CityGrid places ID and public ID. The public ID is a pretty SEO friendly representation of the business, such as macs-irish-pub-new-york-city. This should work as your SEO detail, and you have two options: you can either use a mod_rewrite that will interpret this as next folder or page, or you have to statically build out a folder or page that represents each places listing. Either way your page should have a way to interpret the public ID into a numeric CityGrid ID and then make a call to the CityGrid Places API and make a detail request, returning back the full detail of a business listing.

As I write this, I realize how tough this is to explain, even though it is a pretty simple approach. The basic concept is you use your folder structure to provide the what, where and places SEO friendly detail ID. These are all the core elements you will need to make searches and detail requests against CityGrid API.

I’m working on two separate prototypes to demonstrate this, one is a mod_rewrite version and the other will statically build out pages that actually don’t store any data, except for the places ID--then make live calls again the CityGrid Places API to get what you need in real-time. Stay tuned and I will post the prototypes with accompanying blog posts, this week.

What is Social in Local, Mobile, Social?

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:51:29 PST

I am working to define a CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social stack, to help CityGrid developers more efficiently build web and mobile apps. This definition will contain APIs, tools, platforms and other data sets that can be used along with CityGrid Places, Offers, Reviews and Advertising.

I’m working my way through a bunch of tools and APIs for the local and mobile portion of the stack, but I find myself spinning when I’m trying to define the “social”. Obviously providing information on using the primary social networks in your apps is important:

But where do we go next with social in our local mobile applications? We can find our friends, we can check-in and socially share what we are doing in our every day, local lives--but it seems like there is more that I'm missing.

I have some rough ideas of what could be next for social, but I’d like to solicit thoughts from you developers regarding what is next, when it comes to making your local, mobile apps social. What are you doing in your apps? What do you see others doing? Ping me @citygridapiteam with your ideas.

New York City Open Data Highlight: Restaurant Inspection Results

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:38:29 PST

The amount of open data available right now can be dizzying and overwhelming. When looking through various data repositories and data marketplaces, I am trying to identify open data sets from various cities that may be of use to CityGrid developers.

As I find data sets, that can add value to your web and mobile apps I will highlight here on the blog. Today’s highlighted data set is from NYC Open Data, and provides a complete set of restaurant inspection results for New York City.

When your users are looking for restaurants, while using your applications, it seems that knowing the restaurants latest inspection grade would be useful information in making a decision where to eat.

At the moment CityGrid doesn’t include restaurant inspection grades in our places detail, but with open data sets like NYC restaurant inspection results you could download and link up by restaurant name and address, to augment the already rich business info and reviews you get from CityGrid APIs.

I will be regularly highlighting other city data sets here, in hopes of providing quality data you can augment CityGrid places with, as well let our data acquisition team about new data you would like to see integrated with CityGrid places--so make sure and let me know when you find any of these useful, I will pass it on.

CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack: Geoloqi

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:33:44 PST

In February I’m spending more time building, what I’ve dubbed the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack, a list of APIs, platforms and tools that you can use in your local-mobile applications.

Of course CityGrid Places, Offers, Reviews and Advertising are first in that stack, but I want to identify other APIs, tools and platforms that can also assist you in quickly building your mobile app.

As I add items to this stack. I will showcase them one by one here on the blog. The first one on my list is Geoloqi, which offers a pretty impressive set of location tracking, message and geofencing APIs and SDKS:

Real-time Location Tracking - Low battery impact, easy to setup mobile location tracking system, built for multiple platforms.
- Track Location in Real-time
- Battery Safe Tracking
- Customizable Tracking Rates
- Works Indoors and Outdoors
- SDKs for iOS, Android, Javascript, Ruby, PHP and more
Location-Based Messaging - Location-based messaging tools, allow developers to send messages upon arriving, dwelling or leaving a place, as well as time or day or a user's speed.
- Carrier Agnostic - Works with any carrier
- Battery Safe - minimal effect on battery life
- Push Notifications for iOS and Android, SMS and Email for all devices
Battery Safe Trigger Zones - Enables management of a device's battery life while using location, to minimize battery drain.
- Trigger actions on enter, dwell or exit, speed and temperature coming soon.
- Write custom events to be triggered
- Battery Safe - our SDK automatically manages battery life.
Hosted Spatial Storage - Create and store places, messages, and geofences.
- Create private places
- Quickly import your datasets
- Search for nearby places
- Automatically sync relevant data to users
- Optimized for use with real-time applications and battery-safe operations

Geoloqi is a perfect addition to the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack. They offer some essential location tracking, location messaging and storage every mobile app can take advantage of, and they do it all in a way that considers your users battery life--which will make for a much better user experience.

In Spring 2012 they are also working on rich location based analytics, so you can gain more insight into your mobile app users behavior.

I’m adding Geoloqi to the CityGrid Local, Mobile, Social Stack and will be weaving more of their services into what we offer here in the CityGrid Developer Center as well as our hackathon tools.

Local Directory vs. Local Guide

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:25:37 PST

When I started working with the CityGrid Places API I needed a project to help me learning about how to use the API, and wrap my head around whats possible when building local web applications. I built Hyp3rL0cal which is a local web directory, that I wrote in PHP, then created Python and Ruby versions as well.

While I think local directories are still a very valuable and relevant part of the CityGrid network, I do not think they reflect the future of local web applications. So I”m spending time trying to brainstorm what is next, and I want to explore the difference between a local directory and local guide.

In my opinion a local directory is a web application that provides search and browsing mechanisms for users to discover local businesses and places on the web. The concept of a directory is really built around the user navigating the places data, and finding what they are looking for. Which requires the user to be willing to work for the discovery, something that not every user we be able or willing to do.

This is where I think an important evolution of local comes in--from the local directory to local guide. Rather than requiring users to find their own places, we should be guiding them more and making our local web applications more intelligent in helping users discover what they are looking for.

These are just initial thoughts on this, but one example that comes to mind in the travel industry, is Hipmunk hotel search. Hipmunk provides a streamlined way of guiding you through finding a hotel in a city, between specific dates and allows you to effortlessly filter, drag and mouseover your way to finding your room.

Hipmunk is just one example that comes to mind, I’m sure there are a lot more out there. I will keep hunting for better examples of how to help evolve the definition of local from a directory experience to form of discovery that helps guide you through business and places, and share with you developers, so you can use in your local web and mobile apps.

HyperLocal App Idea: Local Laundromat Home Page

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:25:21 PST

I am sitting at the Wash Tub Laundromat in Manhattan Beach, CA doing my laundry tonight. I was working on my Macbook and the owner of the laundromat asked me if I was able to get wifi on my laptop?

I explained that I have a Verizon USB stick to get my Internet connection, since there wasn’t wifi available. He said he had talked to Time Warner Cable and they said they’d install free Internet for him, but it had been months and nothing. I’m assuming they have some sort of public spaces package that routes users to a home page, upon connecting and monetizes the Internet using advertising.

The laundromat owner said he’d just pay for Internet himself. I told him about CityGrid local advertising, and said he could monetize the home page and probably end up paying for the Internet through local advertising.

Seems like a great idea for a local web application, one that helps laundromat, coffee shop and other business owners set up a default home page for their router, and make money from it using CityGrid local places and advertising.

It would be easy to go beyond just ads on a single splash page and build a quality local directory that introduces customers to other products, services and business in the local area.

As I’m traveling, and talking to small business owners about ideas for web and mobile apps, I will keep sharing with developers here, so you can take advantage of these opportunities.