Beats Music's API launched. Overview of 25 health care APIs. Plus: Apple and Google spar over maps in Carplay, and interoperability plans for Google genomics.
Beats Music Opens its API
There are lots of music APIs, some 205 are listed in our API directory. What makes Beats Music's API newsworthy is the service it integrates for the price: unlimited access to 20 million tracks of music for $9.99 a month--just under $120 a year. A catalog of 20 million plus tracks seems standard among its competitors. (Spotify and Rdio, for example, reach that number, while Pandora is about 1 million. iTunes Radio, unsurprisingly has the most, a reported 27 million). But Beats is a little different, offering a music service, not just a music server, according to the CEO, Ian Rogers.
As Matt Peckham reports in Time Magazine,
...the sort of casual listener Beats is targeting wants a mix of control and curated content instead of one or the other. That’s the tune Beats is humming, and if enough developers are enticed by the prospect of plugging into its ecosystem, it’s a tune you’ll probably see Beats’ competitors eventually take up, too.
After registering for an API and obtaining a key, developers can use Beats' playground tool for experimenting with the APIs.
Twenty-five Health-Related APIs
Health APIs are big news, from Nike's Fuel Band to rumors that Apple's iWatch will warn of impending heart attacks. In fact there are over 100 health related APIs listed in our API directory.But what are the ones that start ups need to know about?
Jonah Comstock, Aditi Pai and Brian Dolan writing in Mobihealthnews, pick a list of 25, many of them fitness related, such as Aetna's CarePass, a consumer health dashboard that brings a lot of health apps together. But some of them are tackling decidedly different angles to the health care picture, such as AdhereTech's pill bottle, featured above, that tracks how many pills are left in a bottle. Is this actually useful--can't you just sort of eyeball it when you are running out? No doubt that is the case, but counting can help prevent accidental overdose, a critical and widespread issue in health care.
The complete list, in case you are hunting for just the right one, is: AdhereTech, Basis, Beddit, BodyMedia, Cigna, Ftibit, Garmin, HealthTap, iHealth Lab, Jawbone, Kaiser Permanente, Lumo Body Tech, MapMyFitness, Mc10, MeQuilibrium, Misfit Shine, Moves, MyFitnessPal, Nike+, Precor, RunKeeper, RXRevu, Sensiotic, TigerText, Walgreens, and Withings.
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