Hack Education

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - January 24th, 2012

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:14:19 PST

From the Foursquare Blog

Hey LA, now its your turn to save $5 on every Restaurant Week meal! - (01/23/2012) - New York Restaurant Week partnership with American Express, saving Card members $5 on every lunch and dinner they have at over 300 New York eateries. Today, we're excited to extend the same deal to hungry explorers in Los Angeles: Spend $21 hundreds of restaurants participating in dine LA's Restaurant Week, and you'll get a $5 credit back on your American Express statement. Redeeming your free money is just as easy as with past American Express specials:Check in at a Restaurant Week restaurant. Go to the Special screen and tap the Load to Card button (you'll also be able to sync your card if you have’nt yet).
Hit the slopes! foursquare Follow Friday, winter edition! #4sqFF - (01/20/2012) - Up for anything? Check out the Best Skiing in the World! In Vermont? This is your list. Aloha Ski and Snowboard Rentals in Park City, Utah has great recommendations, including where to stay and store your gear. Aspen/Snowmassin Aspen, Colorado has great tips and lists on where to eat, hiking spots, and more. Exclusive Resorts has a list of great US ski spots. Or, perhaps Dolce&Gabbanas list of cozy, glamorous snow spots around the world is more your style. We’ve also partnered with a bunch of ski resorts - check out their lists below, and check in when you visit to unlock their badges! Mount Snow in Vermont has tips on how to beat the crowds, food and rental recommendations, and more.
Where my friends at? #APIHighlight - (01/20/2012) - September Hackathon! ) that show off fun things that can be done with your friends check-ins, like sending you around the globe (or Hogwarts), all while sitting at your desk. If you're working with two monitors, they're a perfect add-on to your second screen. Arrivals is a beautifully simple and visual app that displays your friends check-ins like an old-fashioned arrivals board. Fousquare Notifications is a chrome extension that will alert you with desktop notifications when your friends check in. You can click through to add comments, and also tailor the notifications to certain friends, nearby areas, times when you're at the computer, and more.
Find what you're craving, and check out the menu too! - (01/18/2012) - foursquare. com/explore, which uses the 1. 5 billion foursquare check-ins from you, your friends, and the foursquare community to deliver personalized results for whatever you're craving, from burritos to bacon. Now, you can find exactly what you want, because were bringing menus to foursquare. We’ve partnered with the awesome start-up Single Platform to share over 13,000,000 menu items at almost 250,000 restaurants in major U. S. cities, with more on the way. Starting today, you'll be able to click through to menus on the right hand side of venue pages that have menu information. At a lot of these restaurants, we’ve also added a pricing icon to give you a quick sense of how fancy a night you're in for.
Cash back from American Express at all the best restaurants in New York! - (01/18/2012) - Spend $24 (the price of Restaurant Weeks prix fixe lunch special) at any of the participating Restaurant Week spots, get a $5 credit on your American Express statement. If you're doing the math, that means your prix fixe lunches are now under $20 bucks, and your prix fixe dinners are only $30 at over 300 of the best restaurants in New York! Redeeming your free money is just as easy as the past American Express specials:Check in at a Restaurant Week restaurant. Go to the Special screen and tap the Load to Card button (you'll also be able to sync your card if you have’nt yet). Pay with your American Express Card, and you'll see the credit on your statement in a few days!
A design student helps visually impaired people find their friends using foursquare! - (01/17/2012) - The BlindSpot cane incorporates a GPS-enabled smart phone and corresponding ear piece, and sends an audio alert whenever a friend checks in on foursquare nearby. There’s an option to call, or even navigate to where the friend is using tactile navigation!

From the Facebook Developer Blog

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love - (01/20/2012) - This week, we launched the improved auth dialog and over 60 new Open Graph apps. Approving Open Graph Actions We are now approving Open Graph Actions. If you are new to the Open Graph, please review the Tutorial on how to use the Open Graph to integrate your app with Facebook. Please review and check your Actions against the required criteria prior to submission. Writing Questions via Graph API We recently announced the ability to read questions via the Graph API. We are now adding the option to write them.
Open Graph now available - (01/18/2012) - At f8, we announced Timeline and the Open Graph - the next generation of the platform which enables people to tell their stories through the apps they use. The Open Graph has already had a significant impact on music, news, and video, but this was just the beginning. Starting today, developers can build apps that let people add anything they love to their Timelines - whether it is eating, traveling, shopping, running or taking pictures. As a part of the this launch, more than 60 apps are going live today - including Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes / Flixster, Foodspotting, Gogobot, and more. These are great examples of how the Open Graph brings experiences to Facebook.
Launching the Improved Auth Dialog - (01/18/2012) - Over the past few months, weve been testing and iterating on the new Auth Dialog to incorporate feedback from users, developers and other third parties. By introducing new ways for people learn about an app and giving them more control over their data, we believe this update will benefit both users and developers. Today, were making the improved version available and announcing the migration plan for developers. More Control & Clarity for Users Similar to the inline privacy controls people have when they post content, we are introducing a new, inline privacy setting that allows a user to control who can see their app activity on Facebook.

From the Google Geo Blog

Introducing pyKML - a Python library for manipulating KML - (01/18/2012) - pyKML is an open source Python library for generating, parsing, and modifying KML, the geo-spatial data language used by Google Earth, Google Maps and a number of other GIS platforms.

From the Factual Blog

Factual PHP Driver - (01/23/2012) - We are pleased to report the availability of the official PHP driver for the Factual API. This driver wraps our Read, Crosswalk, Resolve, and Schema APIs, providing five-line access to our 55 million global places and other structured data.

From the InMobi Blog

Handset Stats - 2010-2011 - (01/17/2012) - What a difference a year makes! You can download the full set of statistics from the InMobi Research Centre - here are some highlights. World We're close to hitting the point when half the advert requests we get are for smartphones. While sales of smartphones have taken off in recent years - there are still millions of people using regular phones. Are you targeting them all? Europe In Q4 of 2010, Android accounted for around 16. 7% of advertising impressions in Europe. In Q4 of 2011, it rocketed to 32% - zooming past iOS. North America With dozens of manufactures churning out lots of different models, it's always really interesting to see who's up and who's down.

From the PlaceCast Blog

Text Tops Smartphone Usage, While Check-Ins Decline - (01/20/2012) - Insight Express released the latest update to its quarterly Digital Consumer Portrait which reveals some very interesting observations on the mobile behavior of mainstream smartphone users. As Kathryn Koegel pointed out in her AdAge column yesterday, there is an overwhelming counter-intuitive trend emerging from the data: some advanced mobile behaviors are not on an ever-increasing trajectory. Specifically, that text continues to top the charts for usage, while novelty behavior like check-ins are in decline.

The Power of the People Demonstrated Using the Internet

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:56:11 PST

A recent image from ProPublica.org demonstrates the power of the people via the Internet, when it came to influencing our Government. The image shows which members of Congress changed their position after the blackout protest of January 18, 2012.

This shift, demonstrates the power we the people have via the Internet and how important it is that we protect this right, and keep the Internet open and freely accessible to everyone.

Internet at Conferences and Hackathons Shows How Existing Business Practices Can Slow Innovation

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:58:04 PST

I was at the Facebook Mobile Hackathon at a hotel in Boston today, and during the event the Internet started going in and out, and eventually stopped working.

Since every demo was using the Facebook platform they required live Internet. It basically brought things to a screeching halt, when nobody could present, or hack.

This was a small event, but it hurts just as bad, no matter the event size. It happens at most events I attend, no matter the size.

For two years I coordinated the technology for many SAP events and for Google I/O. It was up to me to make sure the registration counters and other onsite technology worked without problems. So I had to have Plan A through C, which included replicated copies of live databases running on local databases, to make sure everything worked, even without Internet.

Most attendees assume that event planners just didn’t account for the size of audience and didn’t purchase enough bandwidth or network infrastructure. Having been on the other side, I’ve seen the reason.

At most event and conference centers you are at the mercy of the venue for Internet. In my early and naive days, while planning events at Moscone Center, I wanted to bring in a secondary Internet feed, so I could supplement our connection. I was told I couldn’t, it was a violation of the venue contract.

I had to use the services of the provider that had the contract with the venue. Nothing else was allowed. So I watched for two years as some pretty amazing Google I/O sessions failed. I had local databases, so registration generally went smoothly.

Todays hackathon was Facebook, but it was a small event. I’ve watched in the past as Google, SAP and other Internet giants are reduced nothing because the Internet has failed at their events.

In my opinion these existing business practices and contracts stifle innovation and the ability for companies and individuals to share ideas, collaborate, and learn.

As we discuss the damaging effects of SOPA and PIPA, which look to put in new ways of limiting innovation, we need to also look at what historical practices that are in place in the name of “business”, which may ensure a few individuals make money, but limit the forward motion of innovation in general.

Switch From SimpleGeo Places, Let CityGrid Pay You to Use Ours

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:26:13 PST

With Urban AirShip shutting down SimpleGeo there are many developers left with the decision of where to go next, to get their places data, as well as context, storage and geocoding services.

CityGrid does not provide context, storage and geocoding services, but we can provide rich places data that developers can use in their web and mobile applications.

Developers can make up to as many as 10 million queries a month for FREE, all you need is to register for a publisher code, and tell us a little about your application.

In addition to FREE access to over 15 million places, CityGrid provides millions of pieces of enhanced local content, including user reviews, deals and offers, photos and videos, social media details, menus, reservations and more.

Next CityGrid provides something you could not get with SimpleGeo places data--the ability to generate revenue from your mobile and web apps. CityGrid provides web, mobile and custom ads, developers can use to monetize their apps. In addition to advertising you can be paid to just display certain places with CityGrid Places that Pay.

All you need to get started with CityGrid is a publisher code. CityGrid APIs are RESTful and you can search for places using a geographic search or by longitude and latitude, an get search or places detail responses in either XML or JSON.

When looking for a replacement to your SimpleGeo places data, take a look at the CityGrid API, and rather than paying for your places data, let CityGrid pay you for using ours.

Building Hyp3rL0cal Web and Mobile Apps

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:29:07 PST

I needed a way to tell the story of the CityGrid API from the perspective of cities across the United States. The way I tell stories is through programming and hacking on APIs, so I needed a project that would allow me to hack on CityGrid’s places, reviews and offers as well as play with different ways of using the web, mobile and custom advertising we offer.

So I created Hyp3rL0cal, my playground for all things local. Hyp3rL0cal gives me a place to publish projects that I hack on using the CityGrid APIs, while also telling the story of what I build in real-time. You can find local applications I build in a variety of languages, complete with links to download and fork on Github, and even in some cases I publish Amazon Machine Images (AMI) with the code already loaded and ready to use.

As the API Evangelist at CityGrid I will be touring around the country attending hackathons and conferences, spreading the word about CityGrid, and interacting with developers in different cities. Each city I visit, I will launch a copy of my local directory prototype for that city, and publish to Hyp3rL0cal. This will allow me to see the quality of data available via CityGrid APIs for each city and community I visit.

I have added a blog to Hyp3rL0cal where I will tell the story of my projects and travels around the country evangelizing about CityGrid. Come back often, I hope this will be as much of a learning experience for you, as it is for me.

Urban Airship Shutting Down SimpleGeo

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:27:20 PST

Just three months after Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo, they are shutting down the places, context and storage service.

Urban Airship is merging SimpleGeo services into their mobile customer engagement solution to offer location and context-based services as part of the package.

Users of Urban Airship will be able to take advantage of location and context to better segment and engage their mobile audience by sending push notifications to users based upon specific device types, geographical regions and during specific time frames.

To be able to deliver this new functionality they are going to shut down the current versions of SimpleGeo Places, Context and Storage by March 31st, 2012.

Urban Airship is redirecting their places data customers to Factual to get the local data they need, and also have an additional list of replacement services for context and storage on their support site.

The good news for SimpleGeo customers is that you won’t be charged for the service, from now until it is closed down, and they are offering up to six months of their Urban Airship Pro Plan for no monthly charge.

This type of service shuttering is definitely a problem for web and mobile app developers who rely on smaller start-ups for their places or other related location data for their applications. Something you won’t see with CityGrid Places API, since we are an established and profitable company, we are not looking to get acquired, and we are actively investing in other start-ups who are building the next generation of local, mobile and social applications.

Foursquare Launches Web Version of Recommendations

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:25:20 PST

Foursquare just took another step with local recommendations by launching a new web version of Foursquare Explore.

Last March during SXSW 2011, Foursquare launched explore for iPhone and Android mobile, allowing users to find things to do nearby, and now has brought this same functionality to the web.

Explore's suggestions are powered by places you've been and frequented, the places your friends have visited, the categories and types of places you prefer, what’s popular with other users, the day of the week, places with great tips, the time of day and a whole bunch of intelligent criteria.

This move by Foursquare shows the power of the checkin and applying your checkins, and your social network’s checkins history toward local recommendations, shaping the places you will go in the future.

The benefits offered by this type of socially driven local recommendations, creates an powerful new set of incentives for mobile users to check-in, one that goes beyond badges and mayor-ship.

Foursquare Explore shows the local check-in has definitely come of age.

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - January 9th, 2012

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:08:42 PST

From the Foursquare Blog

The foursquare-powered art thesis! - (01-09-2012) - Take a look! Know of any cool foursquare projects? Post them in the comments!
API Highlight: Use your check-ins to track your carbon emissions! - (01-05-2012) - bunch of people have been using foursquare to track their New Years resolutions, from staying fit to eating healthy. If one of your resolutions is to be greener this year, you can start by using the AMEE Location Foot printer(ALF) to track your environmental footprint based on your foursquare check-in data. ALF looks at the distance between the places you check in to throughout the week, makes a best guess at what mode of transportation you used (plane, car, or walking), and then calculates your CO2 emissions.

From the Facebook Blog

How-To: Optimize the Graph API data fetch using ETags - (01-09-2012) - Imagine if you could only get data from an API when things have changed or there is new data? Well, you do not have to imagine anymore, the Facebook Graph API now supports HTTP ETags. ETags support on the Facebook Platform can help you reduce bandwidth consumption and client-side overhead by suppressing output when making Graph API calls. In addition, clients (especially mobile devices on slow connections) can increase performance and reduce data usage when calling the Graph API with ETags.
Announcing In-App Currency Offers - (01-06-2012) - Facebook gives users the ability to earn virtual currency by completing advertiser offers. For app developers, these offers can be a valuable additional source of revenue by helping them monetize users that may not otherwise pay for virtual currency. Today were launching in-app currency offers, which lets developers award users with their own in-app currency (e. g. , Fred Currency in Fred's game) upon completing an offer. Previously, developers were able to integrate Credits offers, where users earned Facebook Credits by completing offers. The new in-app currency offers product is in addition to the Credits offers product, and you can utilize either or both in your app.
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love - (01-04-2012) - This past week, we provided an update on our Facebook Platform SDKs, a retrospective of Platform changes in 2011 and launched the following changes:Stories In Timeline App Tab Stories published from an app using Feed dialog or Graph API will now show in the app's tab on the user's timeline. This is consistent with Open Graph actions published from an app showing in the app's tab. Improved Insights for Web Sites We made two improvements to tracking and reporting Insights for Web sites. We now unpack bit. ly URLs and track and report referrals to the underlying URL. As a result, you will now get accurate referral reporting when you use short bit. ly URLs in Facebook posts.

From the InfoChimps Blog

Meet the Infochimps Platform for Enterprises - (01-09-2012) - We are producing more data than ever before in human history. Our lives, our friends and coworkers, the products we buy, where we hang out, even how our behavior changes with the weather all of this data exists online today. For smart developers, figuring out how to connect this data together can help unlock deep value. For enterprises, this can translate to a previously only dreamed about level of insight into their customers, which will ultimately lead to better conversations and more sales. But connecting the dots isn't as easy as it sounds: this data is scattered across the web and it does not integrate with your business existing systems, and often, its just too big.
Program or Be Programmed - (01-04-2012) - average of 40 weeks. Obviously, there’s a need for an immediate and effective solution. However, walk into any tech conference, startup job fair or Big Data meetup and it becomes readily apparent that there are jobs out there, but there aren't enough people with the right skills. With their ingenious and well-timed project, Code Year, Codecademy aims to teach technical skills to the masses via interactive programming lessons emailed weekly. The promise is that participants will be up and programming within the year. We suspect most folks reading this blog have some serious technical chops, but if you aren’t amongst the Rubyists and PHP-junkies, this is a great way for you to get started.
Happy Iowa Caucus Day Why Do We Care? - (01-03-2012) - Historically, the Iowa Caucus has not proven itself an accurate indicator of who eventually wins that year's Presidential election. In fact, the only candidate to win an Iowa Caucus and go on to win the presidency was George W. Bush in 2000. Other winners of the Iowa Caucus have include Mike Huckabee and Bob Dole (twice! ). So, how in the world could a political spectator pick a winning candidate with so few options out there for accurate predictors? Well, you may recall our posts about how Twitter Predicts GOP Front runners or how fundraising may be more correlated to election victors than poll numbers.

Service Offered by Local, Social, Mobile API Providers

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:49:02 PST

To kick-off my role as API Evangelist at CityGrid, I took a quick walk through the world of location and places API.

The CityGrid API centers around places API which provides rich local business data via a RESTful API. So getting familiar with other location and places API is critical to my role.

While going through each of these APIs in the space I flushed out what I'd consider the high levels areas that these APIs offer. This list is a work in progress, with a goal in helping see the industry, and potentially identify where players are leading the industry, and where there are gaps.

Of course it all starts with places information. Rich content about businesses and other geographic points of interest. CityGrid, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other players like Foursquare, SimpleGeo, InfoChimps and Factual all bring places data to the table.

CityGrid and Foursquare also bring merchant APIs to the game, allowing businesses to manage their profile data as well as how it gets syndicated across many networks.

Along with places data there are various geo related services that are offered across these APIs:

GeoCoding
Directions
Distance
Elevation
Geofencing

The next area I'm grouping location services under would be other content directly related to specific places, pulled through APIs:

Reviews
Offers
Images
Videos
Menus
Editorials

After location and business related content I'd say there is a growing pool of related content that may not be directly associated with a business or location, but provide context, and augment places data making it more meaningful to users:

Weather
Demographics
Wikipedia
Neighborhood
Tagging

That isn't a complete list of contextual places content, but a couple of quick ones I found. I will explore this area more later.

After content I'm seeing very distinct actions that users can take around location and places data. Again, I'm sure there are more of these, but here is a short list of location actions:

Check-In
Push Notifications
Recommendations

You can't talk about location data without bringing in mapping. Google Maps is the most well known mapping API, but there are several providers that have JavaScript and Image based location mapping that developers can use in their web and mobile applications.

Next I broke out a group of location specific services, that provide location tools for developers that provide current location of users as well as tools for recording the history of users. There are also robust tools for doing look-ups of location based upon IP address, longitude and latitude and physical address.

While doing the review of location and places APIs I also notice mobile specific tools offered by a few of the provider like mobile network probe for identifying network quality, and mobile specific SDKs, making sure mobile developers can take maximize their usage of services.

Last but not least are a handful of social tools that bring the social to local, mobile, social. Mostly these are hooks into Twitter and Facebook friend networks, but some bring their own social networks to the table, such as Foursquare.

This is just my first draft of the different areas of APIs, tools and services provide by location and places API providers. Its by no means a complete listing, and is meant to give me a start in understanding and organizing the local, mobile, social API space.

If you know of any areas I'm missing and should be considering, please let me know.

Local, Social, Mobile Elections 2012

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:30:15 PST

As the Iowa caucuses, the first official vote of the 2012 primary season, come to a head, the republican candidates are working are to make their case to communities across the state.

Whether via local cafes, truckstops, social networks, web sites, newspapers or polls everyone want to get their finger on the pulse of how people feel in each city and community across the state.

It is January 3rd, 2012. We have 10 more months and 49 states to go!

In the 2012 election season what role will local, mobile and social play out in the presidential election? We saw Barak Obama put social media to full use in 2008, but in 2012 with 75.7% of the population uses mobile phones, (Source: eMarketer, August 2011) the stakes in 2012 are even higher.

Mobile phones will provide a real-time flow of candidate messages, voter sentiment and location information unmatched in any other election.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter will be a main channel for sharing and broadcasting election information, much like 2008, but in much higher volume.

Local places informationwill provide hotels for campaigns to sleep, restaurants to eat, and places to gather and make stump speeches. Other hyperlocal content such as polls, neighborhood, weather and news will be essential to provide context for campaign efforts.

Any way you look at it, local, mobile and social will be amplified in 2012. How will you be putting it to use during the 2012 presidential campaign?

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - January 2nd, 2012

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:09:26 PST

From the Foursquare Blog

3-2-1 foursquare Follow Friday, New Years Eve edition! #4sqFF- (12-30-2011) - Still figuring out your plans for celebrating the end of 2011? Check out these New Years Eve lists from New York, North Carolina, Miami, India, and all around the world! Know of celebrations going on in your town?

From the Facebook Developer Blog

Facebook Platform SDK Support- (12-30-2011) - Over the last few weeks, we have had several questions from developers as to which SDKs we support. We wanted to clarify that we provide support for the following: JavaScript SDK: source & documentation PHP SDK: source & documentationi OS SDK: source & documentation Android SDK: source & documentation.
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love- (12-28-2011) - Last week we announced Mobile Hacks in New York and Boston and outlined new features we are making available to games developers. With the worldwide rollout of Facebook Timeline underway, we are beginning to the process of reviewing Open Graph actions submitted for approval. We expect to start approving actions in January and will post an update once we begin to approve actions in earnest. Once the action is approved, the person who submitted the action for approval will receive a Facebook notification and the app can begin publishing this action to all users.

From the Fwix Blog

More Facebook Users than Buddhists- (12-27-2011) - Check out this neat visualization of different gatherings of people. Size of the bubble represents population and colors represent different types of gatherings, including religions, countries, online services and mass fatalities.

Tweets from InfoChimps

(12-29-2011) 10 Trends for Online Marketers in 2012 http://t.co/IQv5x3EN via @entmagazine
(12-29-2011) Seven Ways Business Owners Can Beat the January Doldrums http://t.co/AUFwlWre via @entmagazine
(12-28-2011) 7 Ways To Regain Your Productivity : Managing :: American Express OPEN Forum http://t.co/38enNTwa via @OpenForum
(12-27-2011) Meet your 2012 goals with help from our List Services, designed to help your business grow List Services http://t.co/LRQAcCib via @infogroup
(12-27-2011) How will Digital Change Small Business in 2012? http://t.co/kkmTx9M7 via @mashbusiness @mashable

Tweets from Acxiom

(12-29-2011) A look back on marketing trends of 2011 - new media, social CRM, and more - and questions for what's to come in 2012 http://t.co/P2R6KtoE

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - December 26th, 2011

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:56:34 PST

Quick Walk Through World of Location & Places APIs

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:04:40 PST

Photo Credits

I took a walk through what I am calling the locations and places API landscape today. Most of these APIs I'm familiar with, but as the CityGrid API Evangelist, I'm getting an opportunity to immerse myself into this new local, social mobile world.

As I immerse myself in this semi-new world I want to share my findings with everyone else. If you have any suggestions make sure and let me know in comments below.

First I started with CityGrid APIs, which provide several key location and places APIs:

The Places API - Provides functionality for information on local businesses, including search, detail, user content submission, and predictive text
The Offers API - Provides coupons and special offers from businesses based on geography and category
The Reviews API - Provides access to customer reviews for businesses selected by id or by geography or category

Then I wanted to see what Google was doing, and of course started with the Google Maps APIs:

Maps JavaScript API - The Google Maps Javascript API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages
Maps Image API - The Google Maps Image APIs make it easy to embed a static Google Maps image or Street View panorama into your web page, with no need for JavaScript

Along with Google Maps they offer a set of Geo Web Services that contain several location and places based APIs:

Directions API - The Google Directions API is a service that calculates directions between locations
Distance Matrix API - The Google Distance Matrix API is a service that provides travel distance and time for a matrix of origins and destinations.
Elevation API - The Google Elevation API provides you an interface to query locations on the earth for elevation data.
Geocoding API - Geocoding is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates
Places API - The Google Places API is a service that returns information about places, defined as establishments, geographic locations, or prominent points of interest

Already with CityGrid and Google I'm seeing that the type of location and places services, really start to get complicated and diverse. With Google Latitude I start separating the location from the place, with what are two location specific APIs:

Curent locations - Represents the user's most recent known location
Location history - Represents the list of all recorded user locations

After Google I have to look at another big player, Yahoo. Yahoo has several location based services:

Fire Eagle - Fire Eagle is a service designed to build and use location-aware applications and services
GeoPlanet - Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth
LocalAPI - Provides a database of information including business address and phone, category, rating, distance, URL, and traffic alerts
Maps - Provides interactive maps with driving directions and traffic information
PlaceFinder - Converts street addresses or place names into geographic coordinates (and vice versa)
Placemaker - Identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguating them and returning unique identifiers

Naturally after taking a look at Yahoo I have to go see what Microsoft is up to in the space:

Bing Maps API- The API that power Bing Maps, an online mapping service that enables users to search, discover, explore, plan, and share information about specific locations
Bings Maps Location API- Use the Locations API to get location information (I love this description!)

After looking at what local and mobile offerings the big players Google, Yahoo and Microsoft had I started looking at less search and mapping based services to more carrier based location and place services. I started with Verizon, who has a single location API:

LBS Network API - The Verizon LBS API allows you to use the user's location to deliver specific services

Sprint brings three location APIs to the table:

Geofence - Provides virtual perimeter services
Location - Determines the location of a Sprint CDMA Device
Presence - Determines if a device is present on the Sprint CDMAnetwork

AT&T has a LBS API:

Terminal Location - Set of Location-based Services (LBS)

Deutsche Telekom has one location API:

IP Location API - Locate Internet users with their IP addresses

Ericsson Labs provides a developer community around a full suite of APIS:

3D Landscape API - 3D Landscape API for integration o realistic 3D MAPS
Mobile Location API - Allows the use a mobile phone user's current CELL-ID to obtain their geographical location
Network Probe API - Provides services measure certain characteristics of network IP connectivity, firewalls and Network Address Translators
Web Location API - Provides location data from a mobile phone using the positioning systems of mobile operators
Web Maps API - Provides dynamic maps for application integration

France Telecom also has a location API:

Location API - Allows applications to get geographic coordinates of a given Orange France mobile phone or a fleet

Makes sense for every carrier to also provide developers with a set of location services, as they don't want to just be dumb pipes. They want to be an integrated player in their own customers handset usage.

Next I start looking to put the social in local, mobile, social. Where else to you start but Facebook, which has two location based objects as part of the Graph API:

Checkin - A checkin represents a single visit by a user to a location
Places - A search option before initiating a checkin, returning name and location information from Graph API

I thought I'd consider Twitter next. They have Places and Geo methods, but it really doesn't seem like its going anywhere, and a really small portion of tweets have geo info recorded. I will consider in the future if I see action around it.

In the category of location based social network I was investigating Foursquareand Gowalla, but with the recent Facebook acquisition of Gowalla I think I will only look at Foursquare. Foursquare offers access to four different APIs:

Core API - Users, Venues, Venue Groups, Checkins, Tips, Lists, Photos, Specials, Campaigns, Events
Real-time API - Notifies venue managers when users check in to their venues, and our user push API notifies developers when their users check in anywhere
Merchant Platform - The Merchant Platform allows developers to write applications that help registered venue owners manage their foursquare presence and specials
Venues Platform - The Venues Platform allows developers to search for places and access a wealth of information about them, including addresses, popularity, tips, and photos

After Foursquare you leave social, getting into the places data world, with popular player SimpleGeo. Similar to Gowalla I was going to overlook SimpleGeo, with their recent acquisition by Urban Airship, but I think SimpleGeo is still an important enough of a player, that we should still consider them in the game. SimpleGeo has four distinct web services for location and places:

SimpleGeo Storage - Storage of data in SimpleGeo system
SimpleGeo Features - Features in SimpleGeo represent real-world places such as businesses, regions, or US states
SimpleGeo Context - Provides relevant contextual information such as weather, demographics, or neighborhood data for a specific location
SimpleGeo Places - Businesses and points of interest

In the pure places data game I'd put Factual in the same category as SimpleGeo. Factual has seven location and places APIs:

Places Category API- Taxonomy to classify entities in the various Factual point-of-interest (POI) datasets
Places CrossrefAPI- URLs for pages that mention a specific business or point of interest or vice versa
Places CrosswalkAPI- Maps third-party (Yelp, Foursquare, etc.) identifiers for businesses or points of interest to each other where each ID represents the same place
Places Global DatabaseAPI- 55 million entities in 47 countries
Places Global Place AttributesAPI- The latest schema for the global places dataset
Places ResolveAPI- Makes partial records complete, matches one entity against another, and assists in de-duping and normalizing datasets
Places RestaurantsAPI- Core places attributes in addition to 43 extended attributes on 800,000+ restaurants, bars, and casual eateries including datatypes such as cuisine, ratings, hours of operations, and price

Tied with SimpleGeo and Factual is InfoChimps. InfoChimps is a data marketplace player with some very strong location and places services:

Wikipedia Articles - Correlate Wikipedia articles with geographic locations
Business Places by Locationary - The Business Places by Locationary API delivers quality business information based on your geographically defined query
Foursquare Places - The Foursquare Places API delivers uniquely rich information about venues, worldwide.
Geonames Places - The Geonames Places API locates all places within a specified area. Places are any geographic points that can be named
NCDC Weather - The NCDC Weather API provides detailed weather data based on your geographically defined query. Weather data points for your query may include dew point, precipitation, snow depth, temperature, visibility, and wind speed details
American Community Survey (Topline) - The 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) Topline API provides basic demographic data based on your geographically defined query
American Community Survey (Drilldown)- The 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) Drilldown API provides detailed demographic data based on your geographically defined query
Core Geographic Regions - The Core Geographic Regions API delivers detailed geodata for any geographically defined query, worldwide
Zillow Neighborhoods - Zillow Neighborhoods retrieves geo data pertaining to neighborhoods within defined geometric parameters
Digital Element IP Intelligence Demographics - A geolocation API for all your demographics needs. Search by IP address to return data about a geographical area, including number of households, gender, age groups and language
Digital Element IP Intelligence Domains - A reverse IP lookup API with 5 fields of search results, all customized to your IP query. Search by IP address to return data about the domain, company, ISP, NAICS industry code and proxy type for an IP
Digital Element IP Intelligence Geolocation - A geolocation API with 20 fields of search results, all customized to your IP query. Search by IP address to return data about a geographical area, including country, region, city, internet connection speed
Geocoding API - The Geocoding API is a powerful and useful tool that provides location information for any given address in the United States. Geocoding is a process that assigns geographic data (ie, latitude and longitude) to an address
Latitude Longitude and Zip Code Conversions - This API returns approximated latitude/longitude centroids for a given zip code, along with the relative city, state, and county

Then moving out of pure data players Yelp has always been centered around reviews, and more recently, with version 2.0 of their API moved to be centered around the businesses. Yelp has two places APIs:

Search API - Searches for Businesses
Business API - Returns full details of businesses

Another player in the space is Fwix. Fwix has a different approach to places, trying to geotag the web. Fwix offers six places and location APIs:

Geotagger API - Returns places geotagged to a given web page
Content API - Returns geotagged content in or near a location
Categories API - Returns the list of canonical place categories
Location API - Returns geographic data for a latitude/longitude point
Places API - Return, Submit and Delete a list of businesses for a given location

After Fwix I found a couple of other mapping, location and places data services:

PushPin- The Pushpin Identify Service is a REST service that takes geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) and resolves them to named locations on the earth
43 Places -Allows users build 43 Places by adding places, asking questions, giving travel advice, uploading pictures of their favorite places and writing stories about the places they've been and want to go.
MaxMind GeoIP� City Database-Determine country, state/region, city, US postal code, US area code, metro code, latitude, and longitude information for IP addresses worldwide.
Compass -Allows access to a database of 16 million business establishments in the USA.

These providers either didn't have clear market share or started deviating into other parallel universes of content and services to location and places, so I'm going to stop here.

These 17 places and location API providers are a lot to process. I want to spend some time getting a handle on the types of services they offer, before I dive into the peripheral services as well as the players that have less market share. But in my style, I'll keep posting my findings as I pull them together.

LinkedIn Open-Sources IndexTank Search Technology

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:55:37 PST

LinkedIn has just open-sourced the technology behind IndexTank under the Apache 2.0 License.

The IndexTank technology has three separate toolsets:

IndexEngine - A real-time fulltext search-and-indexing system designed to separate relevance signals from document text
API - A RESTful interface that handles authentication, validation, and communication with the IndexEngine(s)
Nebulizer - Multitenant framework to host and manage an unlimited number of indexes running over a layer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service

An example of IndexTank in action is, Reddit, which runs on IndexEngine and the API.

They have the IndexTank Engine and IndexTank Service code published at Github, and created a LinkedIn Group to support it.

PyLadies Offers Grant Program for PyCon 2012

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:18:52 PST

PyLadies, an organization that works to bring women to the forefront of the open source world is now offering a grant program for women in the Python community.

The grant aims to make the conference more affordable for women of all levels of experience from all over the world. With an increasing focus on diversity in the Python community and at PyCon, the conference organizers decided to team up with the PyLadies to make it happen.

Applications for the PyLadies grant program run through January 31, 2012, with notification of awards by February 7. You can get more information about both PyLadiesand PyCon financial aid applications are available.

January 2012 Hackathons

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:27:06 PST

These are the hackathons I'm tracking on for January. You can view these on the events page and I have aGoogle Calendaryou can subscribe to.

AT&T Mobile App Hackathon Las Vegas	01/08/2012	Las Vegas
PDX Weekly Hackathon	01/12/2012	Portland
Penn Apps	01/13/2012	Philadelphia
Arduino Camp & Robot Hackathon	01/14/2012	New York
Hackathon for Social Good	01/19/2012	New York
Wikipedia - San Francisco Hackathon January 2012	01/20/2012	San Francisco
Haskell Hackathon	01/20/2012	Cambridge
CityCampHNL Hackathon	01/20/2012	Honolulu
Cleanweb Hackathon NYC	01/21/2012	New York
the Muther Michigan Hackathon and Dev Con	01/27/2012	Detroit
SpinKick - Kickstarting Mobile Apps for Your Business!	01/27/2012	Seattle
HTML5 Mobile Apps Hackathon	01/28/2012	Boston
Digital meets Physical: A Hardware Hackathon	01/28/2012	Providence

I try to record as much information about event as I can, including Twitter handle and email when its available, so you can contact them.

If you know of any hackathons I'm not tracking on,let me know.I'd like to keep thehackathon events calendarup to date with all the events going on around the globe.

Local Places Data Using CityGrid with Hyp3rL0cal

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:17:41 PST

I needed to learn more about theCityGrid APIs. What better way than to actually build a prototype.

I thought it would be good to have a simple local business directory that could be deployed all by itself, or as part of another web site.

I wanted the directory to look good, but I didn't want to do any graphic design, so I usedTwitter Bootstrapfor the user interface (UI).

I put together five pages, allowing you to browse some local business categories in West Hollywood, CA.

Home
About
Search
Detail
Contact

The site doesn't use a database. You set the sites config file to a city and state, it makes calls to theCityGrid APIsin real-ime, with the latest business listings, images, offers and reviews.

The site is providing a way for me to learn about the CityGrid APIs, while also producing usable code that other developers can use to bootstrap their own hyperlocal sites and applications.

This project is still in development, you candownload it at Github.

I will work on other enhancements to this prototype, but first I'd like to create a ruby and python version of Hyp3rl0cal, so it can be used as a base for CityGrid API development.

Lot's of learning ahead, I will keep publishing my code to Github and link everything at Hyp3rL0cal.

Google Affiliate Network API

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:34:47 PST

Google just launched their newGoogle Affiliate Network API, which allows publishers and advertisers to automate various tasks related to theGoogle Affiliate Network.

The Google Affiliate Network is the affiliate network, formerly known as Doubleclick Performics, which was part ofGoogle's Doublick acquisition in April of 2007.

Using the new Google Affiliate Network APIs, developers can programmaticaly manage:

Advertiser Lookup- Publishers can now use the Google Affiliate Network API to access data that advertisers have chosen to share with them.
Event and Order Details- Developers can easily integrate data from events that occur in Google Affiliate Network into their own website's workflow and internal systems.
Publisher Lookup- Advertisers can use the API to look up data that publishers have chosen to share with them

I need to play with the network more to understand how it works from both an advertisers and publishers perspective.

It looks like an interesting addition to the suite of publishing, advertising and revenue generating tools from Google likeGoogle Analytics,Google Adwords,Google AdsenseandGoogle Webmaster Tools.

Local, Geo Landscape Roundup - December 17th, 2011

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:32:49 PST

Kin Lane is the API Evangelist for CityGrid

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:24:23 PST

Here we are, wrapping up 2011. I concluded my first full year immersed in thebusiness of APIs, which started back in September 2010 with myfirst blog post on API Evangelist, then by December I was theAPI Evangelist for Mimeo.

In 2011, I spent the entire year evangelizing forMimeo, while also paying attention to the wider business of APIs, while writing forProgrammableWebandAPI Evangelist. It's been an amazing year and I've learned a lot, but it has left me wanting even more in 2012.

I'm convinced that focusing my evangelism on a single API is important, it helps put into practice, what I write about as an analyst in the API space. In 2011, I was exposed to a lot, but in 2012 I need a more high profile, active API to evangelize if I'm going to achieve what I want.

So, to set the stage for 2012, this month I've been making the transition from being the API Evangelist for Mimeo to the API Evangelist forCityGrid. As I see it, CityGrid has a lot more opportunity around their two very distinct APIs:

Local Places APIs- Information about business listings including location, website, business hours, offers, reviews, maps, images and other rich content.
Local Advertising APIs- Mobile and web app advertising network that allows developers get paid for displaying local content.

Hyperlocal and mobile are both fast growing areas in our society, and I see a huge opportunity to make an impact with a high value API like CityGrid in this space. After reviewing CityGrid, I saw several of the key characteristics I look for in an API: clear value, ease of use and a clear revenue model for both the company and the developer.

Based upon success I've seen around Hackathons in 2011, I've been trying to figure out how to step up my involvement in the hackathon space in 2012. As the API Evangelist for CityGrid I have an opportunity to step up my sponsorship and participation in hackathons across the United States. So, in 2012, I'll be taking CityGrid APIs on the road and seeing what developers and I can do with them in cities across the country.

After meeting everyone behind CityGrid and seeing the un-tapped potential of their APIs I couldn't say no when they asked me to be their API Evangelist. I'm extremely excited to be working withCityGrid--I see a lot of potential. Stay tuned for 2012, its going to be another great year for APIs.

Jumpstarting App Development with Twitter Bootstrap

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:57:53 PST

Like many other engineers I've worked with, Twitter engineers will use any set of tools they are familiar with to deliver the front-end of their applications.

Many of us app developers aren't UI experts, and many of the projects we build don't have requirements for a high quality UI, so we just slap together whatever we can. Which often looks like shit.

Twitter has spearheaded an open source UI toolkit, meant to kickstart the development of web apps and sites, called Bootstrap.

Twitter Bootstrap provides CSS and HTML for several key areas of UI development:

Grids
Layouts
Typography
Media
Tables
Forms
Navigation
Alerts
Popovers

Bootstrap's also comes with custom plugins that work with jQuery and Ender, to make sure your UI is interactive and sexy.

I'm using Bootstrap as a base UI for all my prototype projects. Bootstrap gives me a complete set of UI tools to start with, leaving me to focus on how the application works. When I'm ready to share with anyone, it immediately looks good, increasing the chance that my prototype will have the desired impact.

I really dig what Bootstrap has done for my development, and I encourage anyone to download or fork on Github, and get involved using and adding to the Twitter Bootstrap project.

New Amazon South America Region

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:26:28 PST

Amazon Web Services just announced a new South American Region located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. South America-based businesses and global companies with customers in South America can run their applications and workloads in the new Sao Paulo Region, significantly reducing latency to end-users in South America and allows those needing their data to reside in Brazil for legal reasons, to easily do so.

The new Sao Paulo Region is launched with a complete set of Amazon Web Services, including: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Auto Scaling, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon CloudWatch.

That is seven regions that AWS is operating in now:

US West - Northern California
US West - Oregon
US East - Virginia
EU - Ireland
Asia Pacific - Singapore
Asia Pacific - Tokyo
South America - Sao Paulo

It is eight regions if you count their Government cloud they have in Oregon. Amazon sure has come a long ways to become a truly global cloud computing provider. All they need is an Africa and Middle Eastern presence and they'll have the world wired.

Amazon SNS Introduces SMS Messaging Service

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:31:36 PDT

Amazon Simple Notification Service now supports SMS text messages as a new method for notifications. Now with support for SMS text messaging, Amazon SNS messages can be delivered to SMS-enabled phone.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Amazon SNS is a web service that makes it easy to send notifications from the cloud to applications or people. It provides developers with a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective way to publish messages and have them immediately delivered in many formats, to a wide range of devices.

Previously Amazon SNS supported message deliveries via http, email or to Amazon SQS queues. Notifications can now be sent as text messages to cell phones, smart phones or any other device that supports SMS.

This new Amazon SNS feature can be accessed from the AWS Management Console. SMS notification support is currently supported in the US-East region, and will be available in other AWS regions and countries in the coming months.

Print on Demand Coupon Books

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:02:06 PDT

I just added a new entry to theMimeo Idea Showcase. It is an idea forpersonalized, print-on-demand coupon books.

This idea comes from my co-worker Heath. His thoughts are:

Seems like a subscription service to pick the stores near you have coupon books printed and delivered from a site like Coupon Cabin, would be pretty cool. A rare case where the printed pages have true monetary value. Coupon Cabinsearches, aggregates and verifies printable in-store coupons from offline retail stores. Users can browse the site and find coupons for the things they need, print and use.

The site doesn't have an API (I will contact them and find out more), but it does have an RSS feed. Someone could easily pull real-time data and allow users to browse and search coupons, select the coupons they want and build book from and print one or many copies.

This could be done on an individual basis or for specific locations or types of products and services. As Heath said, its definitely a rare case when the printed pages have true monetary value.

Dedicated Internet Network for the Occupy Movement

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:49:54 PDT

As reported by Adrianne Jeffries of BetaBeat, the Free Network Foundation is building a private network for Occupy Wall Streetand its affiliated movements in other cities.

So far the organization has deployed two prototype FreedomTowers providing Internet access at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Austin.

We are the Free Network Foundation, builders and advocates of distributed and decentralized communication systems. We believe that the Internet should be used to connect people, not to spy on them, oppress them, or turn a profit," says co-founder and executive director Isaac Wilder.

In addition to providing Internet for the occupiers, the network provides local services as well has secure communications between occupy locations, preventing them from getting intercepted on the open Internet.

This is something I've said we need for some time now. We need a blueprint for how its done, have equipment on hand across the country and have people trained up on how to deploy, manage and use at a moments notice.

Free the Network is running a campaign for $75,000 on IndieGoGo, trying to raise money to complete the network, and keep operating. This type of network is critical to the future of democracy and ensuring that any social and political movement can organize, communicate and make their voice heard.