The Latest News On The API Economy
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How APIs Could Save Facebook's User Experience (and others), But Won't
As various services like Facebook deal with competitors by packing more functionality into their apps, those apps are increasingly experiencing usability issues. In the old days of the API economy, outside developers could leverage a service's APIs to build something better. But those days are gone.
07-06-2018
Why Enterprise APIs Are Key to Fully Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
MuleSoft founder Ross Mason has a bit of a reality check for anyone willing to listen. It has to do with how the majority of today's artificial intelligence can only do about half of what it should be doing. According to Mason, it needs to be more of a two way street and for that, you need APIs.
06-26-2018
Why GDPR Compliance Is a Ready-Made Problem For APIs
If you were existing anywhere but under a rock for the last few weeks, then you were probably subjected to a gauntlet of GDPR notifications from the websites that you frequent, including ProgrammableWeb. They may not have even mentioned GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation.
06-14-2018
US Digital Service Launches v2 of Blue Button API to Ease Flow of Medicare Data
Over 57 million Americans get their health insurance through Medicare. However, one barrier to significantly improved care has been the free flow of Medicare claims data between dissimilar systems. According to the US Digital Service however, version 2.0 of the Blue Button API should fix that.
05-01-2018
Why The Lynch Mob That’s After Mark Zuckerberg Has Got The Wrong Guy
To all of you — including the US Congress — that want Mark Zuckerberg's head over the personal data that was gleaned from Facebook and used for profit by Cambridge Analytica, you have got the wrong guy. If you’re quitting Facebook, you might be doing it for the wrong reasons.
04-20-2018
In Wake of Cambridge Analytica Crisis, Facebook Pares-Down Instagram Functionality Without Warning
Facing significant blowback from horrified organizations and users worldwide with respect to the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook appears to be responding with swift action that will undoubtedly result in disgruntled developers and users.
04-05-2018
Google Suffers Another Setback in API Copyright Case. Now What?
When it comes to Oracle v. Google on the subject of the latter’s alleged misappropriation of Java’s APIs in the Android operating system, a federal appeals court has hammered what appears to be all but the last remaining nail into the coffin that could seal Google’s fate.
03-28-2018
How Twitter Can Become the Next Amazon
Over the last few years, one of the more painful things to watch (from a business perspective) is how Twitter hasn’t been able to seriously capitalize on its insane popularity. The stock currently trades at roughly the same level it did one year before the 2016 presidential election.
03-27-2018
Why to Think Twice Before Founding an API Startup, Or Acquiring One
Back in 2005, when I bore witness to the debut of the first two Web APIs (Google Maps and Flickr) while working as a journalist for CNET, I knew something big was about to happen. To this day, it is still one of the most dramatic tipping points our industry has ever seen.
03-26-2018
Salesforce to Acquire MuleSoft in Deal Valued at $6.5B
In a post market-closing announcement yesterday March 20, 2018, MuleSoft and Salesforce jointly announced Salesforce’s intent to acquire MuleSoft in a deal worth approximately $6.5 billion. The announcement comes almost exactly one year after MuleSoft went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
03-21-2018
Developer Attempts to Transcribe a Podcast with Microsoft's Speech API. Hilarity Ensues.
Despite the infinite compute power of the cloud and all the machine learning and artificial intelligence that thrives on that compute power, technology just falls short of our expectations. Which is exactly what happened when one developer gave Microsoft's Bing Speech Recognition API a whirl.
02-15-2018
US Dept. of Defense "Startup" Clearcuts Path To Open Sourcing Pentagon-Developed Software
Software developed by the US government is technically in the public domain. But without clear direction on how to handle the public domain issue or what that means for using an open source license, agencies are often unclear on how to open source software and reap the benefits of re-using code.
02-13-2018
Military Concerns Over Strava Only Scratch The Surface of Blind Faith in the API Economy
Today, on the heels of news about concerns regarding the use of certain fitness technologies that could reveal confidential military troop and base locations, comes an entirely different spectrum of issues to consider before allowing for public or partner consumption of your APIs.
01-29-2018
New Tool From SmartBear Reverse Engineers API Calls Into OpenAPI Definitions
SmartBear has released a tool that it says is helpful for the testing that API providers might do during the API lifecycle. For example, it can reverse engineer an API definition by inspecting existing API calls. However, the experience is marred by several references to the Swagger specification.
01-23-2018
How To Hide API Keys in HTML5 Storage For Public Code Samples API University
We recently wrote about a post from CodePen.io that suggested a way of keeping API keys private when publicly sharing code samples. This time, we've gone back to that idea, given a try, and dogfooded it. We used JSBin to not only show how it works, we've embedded the "bin" in our tutorial.
01-17-2018
How To Use Google's Cloud Speech API to Transcribe a Large Audio File API University
In this, developer-blogger Alex Kras shows us how to overcome the 60 second audio file limitation of the free tier of Google's Cloud Speech API by taking a longer audio file, breaking it up into short chunks, and then cycling through those chunks to make a complete transcription.
01-04-2018
Why the Push/Streaming API Architectural Style is More Prominent Than Ever API University
Today the conditions are more favorable than ever for organizations to consider implementing event-driven non-polling based data retrieval patterns in their APIs. This series aims to help you to better understand your options when it comes to push/streaming API architectural styles.
12-19-2017
How to Create a Quick and Dirty Example of The Proposed Standard for In-Band API Service Warnings API University
As a best practice, API providers often go to a lot of trouble to notify developers of upcoming disruptions or changes to their APIs. All of this happens out-of-band like in a ChangeLog or an email. But how about the idea of in-band notifications, especially when developers are impossible to reach?
12-07-2017
Salesforce Has Cracked The Code On Demystifying Machine Learning For Mortals (includes audio)
To laypeople, the high potential disciplines of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science are enigmas. Most people don't even know what these terms mean, let alone what to do about them. But, in its Einstein portfolio of AI offerings, Salesforce has cracked the code.
12-01-2017
Santa to Miss Final DC API Meetup of 2017. But What About You?
It's the end of November, temps are dropping, holiday music is already filling the airwaves, many of us are still experiencing the consequences of over-eating during the Thanksgiving weekend, and next week is the first week of the month. And you know what that means! Time for another DC API Meetup!
11-27-2017