Today in APIs: Pinterest's Business API

Pinterest offers new business insights API. Sigfox builds a wifi network for the Internet of Things. Plus: Sabre's developer platform for travel opportunities, and a hackathon by women for women.

Pinterest Launches New Business Insights API

Pinterest is launching a new analytics API to help businesses understand the popularity of their products and what drives sales. The API is currently being tested with partners, including Salesforce, Percolate, Tailwind, Hootsuite and others.
 

As Sarah Perez notes in Techcrunch, the company is now valued at $5 billion based on the most recent funding round:

...though the company will continue to offer its own, free Pinterest Analytics product, it knows that some companies choose to use third-party marketing tools to help them figure out ow their business is performing on other platforms. By offering this “Insights” data via API, Pinterest is making it easier for those businesses to engage with consumers on Pinterest, as they’ll be able to see which of their pins are really driving traffic, and which are being re-shared (or, in Pinterest lingo, re-pinned). Businesses would then be able to customize their own Pinterest activity accordingly, including their marketing campaigns.

At the moment, the only way to access data from the API is through the partners listed above. It is not open to additional developers at the moment.

Sigfox Building a Wireless Network for the Internet of Things

Sigfox has new technology to make wireless work based on battery power for many IoT devices. A competitor in the long-range wireless space, the Sigfox radio makes far reaching transmission without the need for plug in power possible--for years at a time.
 

As Patrick Thibodeau discusses in Computerworld, this could be a game changer, blanketing the world with wifi:

Sigfox's technology also means that wearable tech can be connected without a smartphone or proximity to a WiFi network. For instance, a GPS-enabled watch may keep track of your running, but the data isn't mapped until a user connects it to a mobile device or PC. But a GPS watch with a Sigfox radio included will be able to send location data via a network so someone can track your run from home.

Sigfox has competitors—which raises the inevitable questions about how standards and vendors can create an ecosystem together. But even with these stumbling blocks, it's clear the technology is about to explode, if only because of price: the cost for the equipment to enable a device for long-range wifi is about $2.

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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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