Today in APIs: Kaplan Test Prep Buys Dev Bootcamp

Kaplan buys Dev Bootcamp as the coding education space gets more crowded. ReadyForZero releases an API and partners with banks to help reduce credit card debt. Plus: Facebook's plan to take on Twitter's Stream, and Gmail has a new API.

Kaplan Test Prep Buys Dev Bootcamp

Dev Bootcamp has been purchased by Kaplan for an undisclosed amount. The Bootcamp is a 9 week program where students work 14 hours a day to create projects as a way of learning to code.

Over 600 students have graduated from the camps. As Kaplan noted, the market they have purchased in Dev Bootcamp is the beginner student looking to graduate into entry level employment:

"Dev Bootcamp has been tremendously innovative in originating a new industry that addresses a market need, while also scaling an inspiring culture of teaching and learning across multiple locations,” said Bernardo Rodriguez, head of Kaplan’s new economy skills training (NEST) initiative."

The companies couldn't be more different: Kaplan is 76 years old; Dev Bootcamp was founded in 2012. Yet the acquisition fits Kaplan's strategy of acquiring bootcamps, adding the Dev company to its other bootcamps on data science, product design and software coding. Dev Bootcamp is in no small part about culture as much as it is about coding. Kaplan, wisely, plans to leave that culture undisturbed.

ReadyForZero Releases API to Help Pay Down Consumer Debt

ReadyForZero aims to help consumers pay down debt. It started with credit card debt but has expanded to cover student loans and mortgages. It allows users to visualize all their debt and track it, get reminders for payment dates and alerts.

A premium service will track credit scores, allow you to sett up automatic payments and calculate time and interest savings. As Ryan Lawler writes in Techcrunch, the tool really works, yet needs to broaden its reach:

However, the service has only been available on its own website and apps. That’s changing, though, with the launch of an API that will be available for partners to deploy as part of their own websites. The goal, according to CEO Rod Ebrahimi, is to make its tools available in places where most users actually make their financial decisions. That is, on the sites of major financial institutions.

This will shift ReadyForZero from an exclusively B2C company to one also focused on B2B2C. The API is now available for developers.

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Greg Bates A writer for Programmableweb since 2012, Greg is a freelance writer and a maniacal editor of dissertations and term papers. - Follow me on Google+
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