APIs for App Developers

Our August meetup will be at Box.net's offices in Palo Alto. I heard Box has a new iOS SDK, so I asked them to tell us about it, and I invited a few other new API providers to tell us about services that I think are cool. The agenda:

Box.net and the Box API and iOS SDK. See also the Box Mobile Dev Challenge (http://sites.box.net/devchallenge/). We'll be hearing from Jeremy Glassenberg, Platform Manager at Box.

Jeremy Glassenberg is the Platform Manager at Box.net, where he oversees partner integrations, API and platform product management, and Box.net’s community of several thousand developers. Prior to Box, Jeremy was a Product Manager at mSpoke (acquired by LinkedIn), where he advised the business and software development teams and defined new product features. Jeremy has also held positions at Microsoft and Salesforce.com, where his responsibilities included usability analysis of third-party application platforms and developing automation tools. Jeremy holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Retailigence will tell us about their retail-oriented API. From Retailigence:

Retailigence bridges the gap between intent-driven mobile shoppers and the retailers who carry the goods they are looking for. The company will be speaking on the proverbial “last mile” of the retail supply chain by connecting demand from consumers to the supply of brick-and-mortar stores. Retailigence is a fast and easy way for retailers to be visible in the plethora of mobile apps that consumers use, when they are in that "buying mood". Using an open API, the company provides web and mobile apps with location-based product availability. Apps can use this data to guide a consumers 'path-to-purchase' so they can find the products they are looking for, in nearby stores, in the same manner that people use mobile apps to find nearby coffee shops. By sharing their data with Retailigence, retailers are making their inventory 'digitally discoverable' by allowing consumers with demonstrated purchase intent to find a store in their vicinity that has their desired product in stock. Retailigence works with some of the largest and most respected retailers and brands (Best Buy, Nordstrom's, Tommy Bahama, etc.)

Alejandro Perez will tell us about IndexTank,. a hosted full-text search API. From the IndexTank web site:

True Real-time: Indextank is built for the needs of modern web sites where content is rapidly changing. With IndexTank, your index gets updated instantly. Our engines are optimized to update relevance factors frequently with zero fragmentation penalty. Geo & Social aware: Use locations, votes, ratings or comments to improve the quality of your search results. These factors can be used to boost relevant documents and to restrict the results to a radius of a geographic location. Libraries and Tutorials: Use the service with our official libraries for several platforms. We provide clients for Ruby, Python, PHP and Java as well as plug-ins for different platforms. The community also contributes several alternatives to these and other languages. Besides, our Rest API is super simple so you can develop your own client with very little effort.

Andrew Stadlen and Pierre Garrigues will tell us about the IQ Engines API. From Andrew:

IQ Engines offers an image recognition API that powers mobile apps for advertisers, retailers, and photo hosts, and we'd love to share it with the developer community. We already power apps for Best Buy, NexTag, Buy.com, and many more, and we're working on projects with some of the world's best-known tech companies and advertising agencies. The API can identify almost any image and returns a simple JSON or XML result that developers can use however they please -- whether it's tagging images in a photo-sharing application, searching a product catalog for prices or reviews, or powering interactive photo-based social games. This month, we'll also release our instant search SDK for iOS, which can recognize images and barcodes directly on the device without an internet connection and will power immersive augmented reality applications and interactive media campaigns.