Presenting 20 APIs in 20 minutes to give a quick overview of what APIs are out there, from cloud application platforms and facial recognition to email and UFO sightings. Presented at Bisnode HQ in Stockholm Feb 1st 2012.
Cloud application plattform, full hosted IT plattform, just upload code and it runs\nI use it for APIHQ.COM\n\nOwned by Salesforce\nAdd resources, manage processes etc\n
Once your code is running on Heroku you might want to go outside...\n\nFree weather forcast APIs, used worldwide\nProvided free since the taxpayers already payed for it\nPowers many Swedish weather sites and apps\nPowers many international mobile apps\n
If it rains you might want to take the train instead of the bike\n\nMade by developers for developers as an alternative to the data service from the National Railway Company of Belgium\n\nThe company tried to shut down the API, but it is still up and running\n\nPublic transport data is available in most countries, in Sweden via Trafiklab.se\n
Sometimes you can’t take the train instead you have to take the car\n\nIn all new Fords (at least in the US), service with turn by turn directions, hands free calling, internet connectivity etc\n\nPart of syncmyride is an API to control car settings, receive car information such as speed and GPS location, fuel economy\n
A car is great for transporting people, but if you need to transport stuff UPS is a good alternative\n\nUPS API makes it possible to order package pickups, get pricing, track packages and access customer service.\n\nPerfect to integrate into logistics solutions and e-commerce systems\n
Ordering package pickups is one thing, another thing is to pay for it\n\nHandle payments, send money and do risk assessments of merchants\n
Mastercard API is all good, but sometimes you need an acctual bank\n\nWith the BankSearch API you can search for German banks, based on city or zip code\n
What Banks have needed the last few years is a way to predict the future\nMaybe they should have used the Google Predict API\nA collection of Artificial Intelligence algorithms that are easy to use\nTrain the API with a larget set of data\n\nFord uses it to increas fuel economy for its hybrid cars, predict where you are going and thus how much battery/fuel to use\n
Google has a lot of APIs and it can be hard to keep up with what they do and how they work\n\nLuckily they have an API for that in the Google APIs Discovery Service\n
Sometimes Googles APIs are not enough, you need to get data from email\nEmail is a huge database of valuable data\n\nContext.io is an API - get all text from a contact, handle attachments, handle conversation threads etc\n\nPerfect to integrate into a CRM system to list all communications with a given contact for example\n
Sometimes all the information you have about a person is an email address\n\nWith the FullContact API you can get gender, name, location, alternative email addresses, user names on social networks and much more based on just an email address. Get data from public sources, partners, social networks etc\n
Once you have all this data about a person you might want to know if he is influencial in social networks or not. For example to prioritize customer service requests from very influencial people to avoid a backlash on Twitter.\n\nKlout.com API for influence on Twitter and Facebook. Approx 7 billion API calls/month. The defacto standard for social influence online.\n\n
What if you don’t have Twitter usernames or email addresses, you just have a photo\n\nFace.com facial recognition via API\nUpload a large set of pictures, for example your Facebook friends profile images\n
If you want information about companies instead of people the Eniro API might help if you are looking for companies in Sweden, Denmark or Norway. \n\nSearch for companies based on type of service, location etc\n
Information about companies and people is good, but what if you want to contact them\n\n46elks API makes it possible to send and receive SMS or MMS as well as route voice calls. Build your own switch board or send credit ratings out over SMS for example\n
If you get an SMS or an email you might want to automatically analyze it to see what it is about and if it is positive or negative.\n\nSaplo.com have serveral text analyzis APIs to do this. You can also find related texts or tag texts automatically.\n
Depending on your situation you might not need a full fledged text analyzis service\nYou just want to know if a word is a bad word or not\n\nGoogles service What Do You Love do not want to publish 4-letter words, so they created and API to identify these words. It didnt take long before somebody documented this API and now we can all use it.\n\nGoogletjänsten What Do You Love vill inte publicera fula ord, så det finns ett inofficiellt API\n\nBara på engelska\n
From bad words to something more positive, helping people\n\nSwedish International Development Agency handles Swedish foreign aid\nTogether with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs they have released openaid.se\nAPI to all Swedish foreign aid\n
Data about pieces of art - statues, paintings, films etc from museums and cultural institutions all over Europe\n\nWith the API you can search and view all this data. \n
Paintings and old books is one type of culture, another type of culture are Aliens\n\nWith this API you can search among over 60.000 UFO sightings worldwide\n\nFor example you can get what strange lights that have been seen in Gent or in Berlin\n