Spotify's new apps reviewed
Yesterday, Spotify announced a new apps platform, featuring apps from Last.fm, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and more.
Whether this apps platform provides ways for developers to monetise their apps is up for debate, but I want to look at the apps released so far, and whether they enhance the experience for Spotify users.
Study: The ad industry is on the rebound
The ongoing economic crisis has done much to change the futures and perceptions of many industries. The advertising sector is one that many prognosticators have deemed forever changed. Ad dollars lost over the last two years are not ever coming back, they say. But a new study has found a widespread optimism has returned to advertising, with many executives expecting dollars and budgets to increase in the coming months.
According to Advertiser Perceptions Inc., optimism among ad executives is the highest it's been in two years, and ad spending plans are trending upward for most major media. If those plans come to fruition, advertisers will have a lot to be thankful for as November and 2009 come to an end.
Tesco opens up its DB, offers affiliates lifetime commissions
A move by Tesco may provide some hints about the state of affiliate marketing and its future.
Earlier this month, Tesco sent the 150 developers who have been working with Tesco.com's Grocery API an email detailing that the company was opening up its database to them and giving them the ability to build applications that could potentially generate lifelong affiliate commissions.
New job postings hint at Twitter's future plans
Love it or hate it, Twitter is hot. So much so that it received $48m in free media coverage over the past 30 days by one estimate.
But Twitter faces some major challenges and not everything is rosy in Twitterville. A flurry of job listings the company posted over the weekend hints that Twitter is looking to hire the talent it needs to keep the company from falling off the tracks.
Take your analytics anywhere using the Google Analytics API
Do you eat, sleep and breathe web analytics? Do you find yourself constantly checking how many visitors your websites have received today? Is scouring your analytics in search of new wisdom a hobby?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you'll love what Google just announced. If you answered no, there's still probably something of value in it for you too.
Guardian launches open platform
If 'platforms' were a piece of clothing, it'd be safe to say that everybody's wearing them.
News organizations are getting into the act too and The Guardian yesterday announced the launch of its Open Platform.
The Econsultancy Twitter experiment
About an hour ago we implemented an experiment to display all tweets featuring the word ‘Econsultancy’ on our homepage, something we've had in mind for a few months.
The ‘widget’ was patched together in-house and simply searches for ‘Econsultancy’ via the excellent Twitter API, then aggregates these tweets into a feed. There are a few improvements we have planned for the code (we've just inserted a timestamp).
We planned on adding the feed to the sidebar in the blog, but decided instead to debut this on our homepage.
Yahoo makes developers the BOSS
Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service, or BOSS, is one of the most visible components of Yahoo's Open Strategy.
With BOSS, developers are given the ability to build their own search engines that query Yahoo using an API and can then take the results that Yahoo returns and do with them what they please.
Best Buy 'remixes' it up with developer API
Facing perhaps the toughest economy for retailers in decades, Best Buy is turning to a new group that it thinks can help it boost sales: developers.
The consumer electronics retailer, which operates in the United States and Puerto Rico, may have gotten rid of its biggest competitor after Circuit City was forced to shut its doors but that doesn't mean that Best Buy can relax.
Popular "platforms" and APIs
There's no doubt that the plethora of third-party developer platforms and APIs that exist today have given developers a considerable number of opportunities to build applications that can quickly made available to millions upon millions of people.
Here is a list of some of the more popular platforms and APIs that developers have successfully leveraged to build popular applications - some of which even reportedly generate significant revenues.
