FinTech in the Payments Spotlight at Transact 2017 in Las Vegas this week

Transact 2017 takes place this week in Las Vegas, Tuesday to Friday, May 9-12. Transact “is the one show focused solely on the business of payments. Powered by Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), the world’s largest payments industry trade group, it’s the place where innovators gather to make the deals that shape the industry”. The who’s who of FinTech companies will be on hand participating in keynote presentations, technical sessions, committee meetings, the exhibit hall and other special events.

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FinTech companies at Transact 2017 along with links to their developer programs

Here is a partial list of companies participating at Transact 2017. The conference site has a complete list of exhibitors and presenters.

 

ETA Star Awards – Wednesday, May 10

On Wednesday night, the ETA Start Awards, sponsored by Visa, will showcase individuals and companies that impacted the payments industry in the past year. You can see the list of 2017 Star Award finalists and Innovation showcase awards.

Payments Pitch-Off & E-Pay Innovation Award – Thursday, May 11

Payments startups will demonstrate their products in front of a panel of judges. Sponsored by Vantiv, The selected startups will try to impress the judges with their new electronic payments technology product or service. The presentations will take place in front of an audience that will include the judging panel, FinTech media, investors and possible industry partners. The best new technology, product and/or service will be awarded the E-Pay Innovation Award of $25,000.

 

DRC 2017 Boot Camp – Best Practices from attendees

During one of the Evans Data 13th Annual Developer Relations Conference Sunday Boot Camp sessions on Best Practices (featuring developer programs and features from boot camp attendees), three specific developer program sites were called out by several of the attendees. In addition, we also had the opportunity to have two of our Boot Camp faculty members on hand to talk more about their developer programs, sites and features.

 

Ford Developer Program

Scott Burnell, Ford Motor Company Global Lead, Business Development & Partner Management, spent a few minutes talking about the Ford Developer Program and took questions from the attendees. Scott covered several of the Ford developer program offerings including:

  • SYNC® AppLink™ – AppLink is a suite of APIs that provide the ability for mobile developers to extend the command and control of a mobile application to the in-vehicle Human Machine Interface (HMI).

Ford Sync

  • Smart Device Link (SDL) – an open-source POSIX-compliant technology platform on which the Ford AppLink product is built and allows it to communicate between applications running on a mobile device and our SYNC in-vehicle software.
    • https://developer.ford.com/pages/sdl
    • POSIX-compliant technology platform
    • Deploy to Linux, QNX, or other popular embedded operating systems
    • Communicate with any mobile device OS such as iOS or Android.
  • OpenXC – a non-production open source interface, designed to attract top developers to experiment with DIY projects in Ford vehicles (with or without SYNC).
Ford TDK

Ford TDK

 

 

ThingWorx Developer Program

Michael Aglietti, VP of Developer Programs at ThingWorx, got up next and spent a few minutes going over the ThingWorx developer program, specific aspects that are unique to an IoT company and took questions from the attendees. Michael covered some of the ThingWorx offerings including:

  • “Begin Your IoT Journey”
  • Program is focused to help developers:
    • Make – ThingWorx allows you to connect anything and everything including devices, sensors, and systems.  By leveraging the power of the platform, you can quickly build impactful solutions.
    • Analyze – You do not have to be a data scientist to produce insights as if you were one. Leverage our platform to derive meaningful insights from your data.
    • Code – Use the ThingWorx development tools and API’s to quickly connect devices and build secure applications. Leverage existing systems and device clouds for ultimate flexibility.

Thingworks Make Analyze Code

  • REST APIs – Quick starts, How To’s, Cheat Sheets
  • SDKs for Java, .NET, C, iOS, Android
  • Edge Micro Server (EMS) – Raspberry Pi
  • Marketplace – The ThingWorx Marketplace gives you easy access to everything you need to build and run your ThingWorx based IoT application: From extensions and apps that can be downloaded and integrated directly into your ThingWorx application to partners that can help you build your IoT solution or offer certified and compatible products that work with it.

ThingWorx Analytics

 

Three Developer Programs attendees said had great Documentation Best Practices

Several of the boot camp attendees mentioned the following three developer programs saying they had great documentation for developers.

slack_api_logo Twilio Mark - Red Stripe Logo (blue)

 

Thank You AngelHack, Boot Camp Faculty, Product Marketing Panelists and Attendees

A big thanks to AngelHack for sponsoring this year’s Evans Data Developer Relations Boot Camp. Two big thank you(s) to Scott (from Ford) and Michael (from ThingWorx). And finally, massive thank you(s) to all of our great boot camp attendees for your participation and your feedback surveys. With your help we will continue to evolve the boot camp day to meet your needs. I hope we see you again next year!

David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/

DevNet Create 2017 – more than just another developer conference

When is a developer conference more than just another vendor and developer conference? When the leading technologies including cloud, Internet of Things, devices, platforms, frameworks and architectures are combined with the ingenuity of developers in one location for a couple of days, the result is a creative explosion, a coming together of minds and machines. There are many developer conferences through the calendar year. There are numerous weekend hackathons, maker fairs, meetups and developer gatherings. Blooming this Spring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24, is DevNet Create: The IoT and cloud developer conference where applications meet infrastructure. I can only say one thing: Developer Relations Professionals and Developers – Be There or Be Trapezoidal!

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DevNet Create: Where Applications meet People, Places, Things, the Cloud, and Business

From the conference page: “Join the brightest of the IoT, cloud and enterprise developers to bring clarity to the blurred lines between infrastructure and applications. Enterprise app developers are driving the future of business through cloud, IoT and new developer platforms and tools trends. These apps aren’t just for business—they affect everything—people, places, and things. They are built on a programmable infrastructure connected through APIs and DevOps practices, making the relationship between infrastructure and apps symbiotic.”

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Two Tracks, lots of Hands-On to Create: IoT and User Experience, Cloud and DevOps

The call for papers closes this Thursday March 30, 2017. Submit talks at https://www.papercall.io/devnetcreate2017

Blog post announcing “Introducing DevNet Create Conference in May 2017” at http://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/introducing-devnet-create-conference-in-may-2017

Conference home pagehttps://www.devnetcreate.io/2017/

Where: Bespoke at Westfield San Francisco Centre

When: May 23 and 24, 2017

 

Where Apps Meet …

I love the apps focused themes that are included for each of the two tracks. They are all based on a statement that starts with “Where Apps Meet…”

susie-speaker
Read Susie Wee’s (Cisco VP & CTO of DevNet Innovations. Experience/Technology/Teamwork/Developers) blog post: “Where apps meet …

IoT and User Experience track:

  • Where Apps meet Things
  • Where Apps meet Places
  • Where Apps meet People
  • Where Apps meet Design & Architecture

 

Cloud and DevOps track:

  • Where Apps meet Microservices
  • Where Apps meet Deployment / SLAs / Scale / Expectations
  • Where Apps meet Security
  • Where Apps meet Analytics (Intelligence)

 

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David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/

 

Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 2, Number 4

In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.

Developer Programs and APIs in the News

Apple – Mar 9 – Reuters: Apple’s Siri learns Shanghainese as voice assistants race to cover languages – “Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions. But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.”
Didi Chuxing – Mar 8 – TechCrunch: China’s Didi Chuxing opens U.S. lab to develop AI and self-driving car tech – “China’s Uber rival Didi Chuxing has officially opened its U.S.-based research lab. The new center is part of a move to suck up talent beyond Didi’s current catchment pool in China, particularly in the areas of AI and self-driving vehicles, but it doesn’t signal an expansion of its service into North America.”
Google – Mar 8 – Announcing Google Cloud Video Intelligence API, and more Cloud Machine Learning updates – “Cloud Video Intelligence API (now in Private Beta) uses powerful deep-learning models, built using frameworks like TensorFlow and applied on large-scale media platforms like YouTube. The API is the first of its kind, enabling developers to easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities (nouns such as “dog,” “flower” or “human” or verbs such as “run,” “swim” or “fly”) inside video content. It can even provide contextual understanding of when those entities appear; for example, searching for “Tiger” would find all precise shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google Cloud Storage.”
Microsoft – Mar 8 – ZDNet: Microsoft’s HoloLens: How these surgeons can now voyage around patients’ organs – “Using Microsoft’s HoloLens platform, researchers in Oslo have developed a way of turning traditional two-dimensional medical images into 3D augmented-reality models for planning surgery and navigating around organs during operations. The project by researchers at the Intervention Centre at Oslo University Hospital, working with developers at IT consultancy Sopra Steria, was recently awarded a Microsoft Health Innovation Award.”
Kaggle, Google – Mar 8 – Kaggle Joins Google Cloud – “I’m proud and excited to share that Kaggle is joining Google Cloud! The Kaggle team will remain together and will continue Kaggle as a distinct brand within Google Cloud. We will continue to grow our competitions and open data platforms, and we will remain open to all data scientists, companies, techniques and technologies. Kaggle Kernels will continue to support a diverse ecosystem of machine learning libraries and packages supported by Google as well as those outside of Google’s toolkit.”
NVIDIA – Mar 7 – PC World: Nvidia’s Pascal-powered Jetson TX2 computer blows away Raspberry Pi – “The Raspberry Pi may be the most widely known board computer being sold, but Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 is one of the fastest. The Jetson TX2, unveiled Tuesday, is a full Linux computer on a tiny board the size of a Raspberry Pi. It’s designed to help make robots, drones and other devices that rely on computer vision applications.”
IBM – Mar 7 – Forbes: LendIt Conference 2017 – IBM’s Brian Walter Talks AI And Financial Solutions – “Brian Walter is the Global Leader of Watson Client Insights and Cognitive Experience for the newly formed Watson Financial Services Solutions organization.” Discusses how AI is changing the financial world.
Lyft – Mar 7 – Announcing the Dispatch Developer Program – “Since the inception of our Developer Platform last year, we’ve worked to provide the best APIs and SDKs to uplift external developers to leverage our on-demand transportation network. Building upon this success, we’re very excited to announce the launch of our new Dispatch Developer Program. This program is centered around providing developers greater flexibility in integrating with Lyft by giving them the ability to request on-demand and scheduled rides without their customers requiring a smartphone or a Lyft account.”
IBM, Salesforce – Mar 6 – IBM and Salesforce Announce Landmark Global Strategic Partnership – “IBM and Salesforce today announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.”
Maersk, IBM – Mar 5 – Maersk and IBM Unveil First Industry-Wide Cross-Border Supply Chain Solution on Blockchain – “IBM and Maersk announced today a new collaboration to use blockchain technology to help transform the global, cross-border supply chain. The blockchain solution based on the Hyperledger Fabric and built by IBM and Maersk, the global leader in transport and logistics, will be made available to the shipping and logistics industry. The solution will help manage and track the paper trail of tens of millions of shipping containers across the world by digitizing the supply chain process from end-to-end to enhance transparency and the highly secure sharing of information among trading partners.”
Mozilla – Mar 3 – The Story of Firefox OS – Ben Francis’ “version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the ‘transition’ of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.”
Amazon – Mar 3 – Announcing Lock Control and Query for Smart Home Skills – “Today we are happy to announce lock control and query, a new feature in the Smart Home Skill API now available in the US, with support for the UK and Germany coming soon. This feature is supported with locks from August, Yale, and Schlage as well as hub support from SmartThings and Wink. Now any developer targeting devices with locking behavior can enable customers to issue a voice command …”
Ozlo – Mar 2 – Our Platform Is Open For Business – “Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our platform. Intelligent systems powered by Ozlo are able to have longer, more meaningful conversations that convert more frequently and increase customer engagement. Ozlo’s knowledge index is the first to offer probabilistic assertions alongside accepted facts — creating a fundamentally better model that reflects the nuances of everyday life. The index forms the foundational layer of our platform, which is a powerful suite of APIs that can be used to build an intelligent assistant from the ground up, increase the knowledge and understanding of an existing assistant technology, or power any system requiring deeper knowledge.”
Dotloop – Mar 2 – Dotloop Launches Improved Developer Platform – “Dotloop, simplifies the real estate buying and selling process, today announced the launch of a new dotloop application program interface (API) platform for developers. The update makes it easier for developers to more seamlessly create new integrations for external real estate technology and transaction services with dotloop’s platform. The improved dotloop API features an expanded and robust feature set, including the ability to create a new transaction (“Loop It”) within an external application as well as to enable two-way communication and flow of transaction between an application and dotloop.”
NASA – Mar 1 – NASA Releases Software Catalog, Granting the Public Free Access to Technologies for Earthly Applications – “NASA has released its 2017-2018 software catalog, which offers an extensive portfolio of software products for a wide variety of technical applications, all free of charge to the public, without any royalty or copyright fees. Available in both hard copy and online, this third edition of the publication has contributions from all the agency’s centers on data processing/storage, business systems, operations, propulsion and aeronautics. It includes many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe. A number of software packages are being presented for release for the first time. Each catalog entry is accompanied with a plain language description of what it does.”

 

 

Send me your Developer Programs News!

If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/

Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 2, Number 3

In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.

Developer Programs and APIs in the News

DataDog – Feb 15 – Datadog Announces General Availability of Application Performance Monitoring – “Datadog APM (application performance monitoring) extends visibility beyond the infrastructure and into the code-level for service-oriented applications. This new expansion of the company’s existing infrastructure monitoring platform will enable development and operations (DevOps) teams to quickly troubleshoot issues in highly distributed, service-oriented applications that use microservices, containers, and run across hybrid cloud environments.”
IBM – Feb 15 – IBM Brings Machine Learning to the Private Cloud – “IBM today announced IBM Machine Learning, the first cognitive platform for continuously creating, training and deploying a high volume of analytic models in the private cloud at the source of vast corporate data stores. Even using the most advanced techniques, data scientists – in shortest supply among today’s IT skills1 – might spend days or weeks developing, testing and retooling even a single analytic model one step at a time. IBM has extracted the core machine learning technology from IBM Watson and will initially make it available where much of the world’s enterprise data resides: the z System mainframe.”
Radar – Feb 15 – Introducing Radar – “The location platform for mobile apps. We’re ten years into the smartphone era, but building products and services with location is still too hard. We’re building Radar to change this.
Radar is the location platform for mobile apps. Our mission is to help companies collect, analyze, and act on location data. Add the SDK to your iOS and Android apps to start tracking user locations with fewer than 10 lines of code. Create unlimited geofences, representing places or regions, via the dashboard, bulk import, or the API. Receive geofence entry and exit events client-side or server-side via webhooks. Or, export events for analysis.”
Google – Feb 15 – Announcing TensorFlow 1.0 – “Today, as part of the first annual TensorFlow Developer Summit, hosted in Mountain View and livestreamed around the world, we’re announcing TensorFlow 1.0. It’s faster (1.0 is incredibly fast!). It’s more flexible (1.0 introduces a high-level API for TensorFlow). It’s more production-ready than ever (1.0 promises Python API stability).”
Galamon – Feb 14 – Gamalon Invents and Commercializes Radical New Approach to AI; Accelerating Machine Learning By More than 100x – “Today, Gamalon, Inc., emerged from stealth mode to announce that it has developed a game-changing new approach to artificial intelligence/machine learning called Bayesian Program Synthesis (BPS). Gamalon’s BPS technology – for the first time – writes and rewrites its own Bayesian programs. This technology achieves higher accuracy and uses orders of magnitude less computation and training data relative to today’s state-of-the-art deep machine learning.”
Google – Feb 14 – Introducing Cloud Spanner: a global database service for mission-critical applications – “Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability.”
IBM – Feb 13 – IBM Delivers Watson for Cyber Security to Power Cognitive Security Operations Centers – “IBM Security (NYSE: IBM) today announced the availability of Watson for Cyber Security, the industry’s first augmented intelligence technology designed to power cognitive security operations centers (SOCs). Over the past year, Watson has been trained on the language of cybersecurity, ingesting over 1 million security documents. Watson can now help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools.”
CloudFoundry and IBM – Feb 13 – IBM Sponsors New Node.js Track at 2017 Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley – “Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard platform for cloud applications, today announced IBM (NYSE: IBM) will host a Node.js track at the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley. IBM is also a Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley Platinum sponsor. Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley will take place June 13-15 in Santa Clara, California and is the premier event for enterprise application developers. The event will focus on microservices and continuous delivery in all languages and frameworks.”
NXP – Feb 9 – Is 2017 the year of the smart meter? – “Ultra-low-power and low data rate applications make up one domain that is particularly well suited for this discussion. For example, devices that address the smart meter domain, building or home control as well as asset tracking and monitoring do not need to run over traditional high data rate telecommunications networks such as 3G or 4G. There are a number of good reasons to seek alternative solutions reaching from cost per connection, handling of SIM cards and the simple fact of course that mobile networks are specifically designed for high data rates incurring high power consumption on the end points.”
Google – Feb 9 – Android Wear 2.0 is here with new hardware features! – “Today, we are releasing the final SDK for Android Wear 2.0. In this release, we have added support for the new hardware features announced yesterday. If you have not done so already, it really is time to publish your apps so as to not miss the consumer hardware launch tomorrow.”
GoogleFuzzing PCI express: security in plaintext – “With the risk of malicious behavior from compromised PCIe devices, Google needed to have a plan for combating these types of attacks, especially in a world of cloud services and publicly available virtual machines. A key weapon in our arsenal is fuzzing, a testing technique that uses invalid, unexpected or random inputs to expose irregular behavior, such as memory leaks, crashes, or undocumented functionality. The hardware fuzzer we built directly tests the behavior of the PCIe switches used by our cloud GPUs.”
Microsoft – Feb 8 – Run ad campaigns using Windows Store services – “Use the Windows Store promotions API to programmatically manage promotional ad campaigns for apps that are registered to your or your organization’s Windows Dev Center account. This API enables you to create, update and monitor your campaigns and other related assets such as targeting and creatives. ”
Intel – February 8 – Intel Supports American Innovation with $7 Billion Investment in Next-Generation Semiconductor Factory in Arizona – “Intel’s Fab 42 will Target Advanced 7 nm Technology and Create More Than 10,000 Jobs in Arizona – ‘Intel’s business continues to grow and investment in manufacturing capacity and R&D ensures that the pace of Moore’s law continues to march on, fueling technology innovations the world loves and depends on,’ said Krzanich. ‘This factory will help the U.S. maintain its position as the global leader in the semiconductor industry. Intel is a global manufacturing and technology company, yet we think of ourselves as a leading American innovation enterprise,’ Krzanich added. ‘America has a unique combination of talent, a vibrant business environment and access to global markets, which has enabled U.S. companies like Intel to foster economic growth and innovation.'”
Intel – Feb 8 – Intel Unveils Deep Learning Library for Apache Spark – “Intel today announced the open-source BigDL, a Distributed Deep Learning Library for the Apache Spark* open-source cluster-computing framework. The deep learning library is part of Intel Corporation’s strategy for enabling state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence in the industry. The BigDL features an efficient large-scale distributed deep learning library built on Spark architecture that makes deep learning more accessible to big data users and data scientists. BigDL enables the exporting of AI expertise to data scientists now working across thousands of applications in hundreds of fields.”
Intuit – Feb 7 – The $100,000 Small Business App Showdown is back – and this year, it’s YOUR turn to win the $100,000 grand prize! – “Intuit Developer is excited to pre-announce our second $100K Small Business App Showdown – an awesome app contest exclusively for developers who successfully publish their apps on Apps.com between August 16, 2016 and August 15, 2017.”
Intel – Feb 8 – Intel Unveils Security Readiness Program to Help Prevent Cybercrime in Health Care – “Intel has teamed up with over 40 solution providers to create the Healthcare Security Readiness Program, aimed at helping to prevent breaches, including cybercrime hacking and ransomware. Nearly 90 percent of health care organizations – often seen as vulnerable targets lagging in security compared with peers in other industries, such as financial services – have experienced a breach in the past two years.”
Intel – Feb 5 – Intel Drones Light Up Lady Gaga Performance During Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl LI Halftime – “Today during the Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl LI Halftime Show, Intel Corporation collaborated with the NFL, Pepsi and six-time GRAMMY®*-winning music icon, Lady Gaga, to create a unique drone light show experience to kick off her performance. Three hundred Intel® Shooting Star™ drones lit up the sky in a choreographed aerial performance marking the first-ever drone integration during a televised event and a Super Bowl.”
Google – Jan 31 – Introducing the Mobile-Friendly Test API – “The Mobile-Friendly Test API lets you test URLs using automated tools. For example, you could use it to monitor important pages in your website in order to prevent accidental regressions in templates that you use. The API method runs all tests, and returns the same information – including a list of the blocked URLs – as the manual test. The documentation includes simple samples to help get you started quickly.”
GM – Jan 26 – Tech Crunch: GM’s new SDK for in-car infotainment apps offers access to nearly 400 data points – “Historically, the automakers haven’t made it very easy for partners to really utilize the connected vehicle experience, Wrenbeck explained. So we set out about seven months ago, as part of our API platform to really fix that and make it very easy for the corporate community to exploit the connected vehicle experience.”
Uber and Garmin – Jan 4 – Introducing the Uber ETA app for Garmin wearables – “Today, we’re excited to introduce the new Uber ETA app by Garmin for Connect IQ – powered by the Uber Trip Experiences API. ‘The insight that each screen or device serves a specific purpose in the life cycle of any workflow – including an Uber ride – is a great one. We’re excited to work with Garmin to create an elegant solution for their wearable devices that makes it easier than ever for riders to keep an eye on their ride’s status with a flick of the wrist,’ Chris Saad, Head of Product, Uber Developer Platform”

 

Send me your Developer Programs News!

If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/

Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 2, Number 2

In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.

Developer Programs and APIs in the News

Google – January 31 – Google IO developer conference – May 17-19, 2017. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA – “Check back soon for more details.”
VoiceLabs – January 30 – VoiceLabs releases 4 new SDKs for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – “We’re excited to roll out new VoiceLabs SDKs to support the entire ecosystem of voice developers. For Alexa: In addition to Node.js, Java and Python, you’ll find a new Ruby SDK and a modified Python SDK to support the Flask-ask platform. For Assistant: In addition to Node.js, there is now a Java SDK and a Python SDK.”
Microsoft – January 30 – Announcing .NET Core, .NET Native and NuGet Updates in VS 2017 RC – “We just released updates to the .NET Core SDK, .NET Native Tools and NuGet, all of which are included in Visual Studio 2017 RC. You can also install the .NET Core SDK for command-line use, on Windows, Mac and Linux.”
Amazon – January 30 – Excited about MXNet joining Apache! – “We have a significant team at Amazon working with the MXNet community to continue to evolve it. The team proposed MXNet joining the Apache Incubator to take advantage of the Apache Software Foundation’s process, stewardship, outreach, and community events. We’re excited to announce that it has been accepted.”
Facebook – January 30 – parse.com is now shut down – “The Parse service is now shut down. To all the developers out there, it was a pleasure helping you build apps. Goodbye and good luck!”
Node.js Foundation – January 26 – The Node.js Foundation Partners with The Linux Foundation on New Node.js Certification Program – “The Node.js Foundation, a community-led and industry-backed consortium to advance the development of the Node.js platform, today announced development of the inaugural Node.js certification program aimed to establish a baseline competency in Node.js.”
Cisco – January 25 – Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Application Performance Monitoring Leader AppDynamics – “AppDynamics’s cloud application and business monitoring platform enables the world’s largest companies to improve application and business performance. The combination of Cisco and AppDynamics will allow us to provide end to end visibility and intelligence from the network through to the application; which, combined with security and scale, and will help IT to drive a new level of business results.”
Apple – January 24 – Allow Users to Provide Ratings From Within Your App – “With iOS 10.3 developers can use a new API to ask users to provide store ratings from within the app.”
Qlik – January 24 – Qlik Sense Cloud Business Now Available for Immediate Web-based Visual Analytics – “Powered by the patented QIX Associative Indexing Engine, Qlik Sense Cloud Business provides the scalability and performance of the industry-proven Qlik visual analytics platform in a complete cloud environment.”
Intel – January 24 – ZTE Achieves Performance Breakthrough for Deep Learning with Intel FPGAs – “Intel and ZTE, a leading technology telecommunications equipment and systems company, have worked together to reach a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The technology is what many companies in Internet search and artificial intelligence are trying to advance, and includes picture search and matching, as one example.”
Microsoft – January 23 – Microsoft makes testing easy with open source Visual Studio Test – “Microsoft has open sourced its Visual Studio Test aka VS Test platform. The latest open source project by the software giant was originally used by its internal team to run tests in various languages. Available as a part of the .Net Core Tools in Visual Studio, VS Test is popularly used for integrated testing with Visual Studio. ”
Qt Company – January 23 – Qt v5.8 is released – “I am happy to announce that Qt 5.8 has been released today and is available for download from qt.io. Qt 5.8 does of course come with Qt Creator 4.2.1 and an update to Qt for Device Creation. Qt 5.8 is a rather large release, containing quite a large set of new functionality.”
Oracle – January 19 – Oracle acquires Apiary – “Oracle today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Apiary, whose pioneering APIFlow solution provides the framework and tools for developing application programming interfaces (APIs) that share enterprise services and data and help create modern, cloud-based applications and experiences.”
Google – January 18 – Welcoming Fabric to Google – “Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve signed an agreement to acquire Fabric to continue the great work that Twitter put into the platform. Fabric will join Google’s Developer Product Group, working with the Firebase team. Our missions align closely: help developers build better apps and grow their business.”
VoiceLabs – January 15 – The 2017 Voice Report by VoiceLabs – “In 2016, Amazon Echo evolved from novelty to in-the-home powerhouse, with over seven million devices in households. Google Home launched in November, legitimizing a multi-platform ecosystem of voice-first devices. VoiceLabs created The Voice Report to help define this emerging market, map out key pieces of the ecosystem, and highlight both the impressive growth and areas for improvement.” The VoiceLabs 36-page 2017 Voice Report highlights key analysis and predictions for voice first devices and based applications.
Visa – January 12 – Meet Visa Developer’s Community Manager Ricardo Navarro – “Meet Ricardo Navarro! He joined Visa as our new Visa Developer Community Manager. As Community Manager, he’ll be engaged in supporting and inspiring developers to become more familiar trying out the APIs connected with this new innovative platform.” This post has a Q&A with Ricardo so you get to know him better.
Google – January 6 – The Google+ API for Hangouts is no longer supported. – “We will be retiring the Google+ Hangouts API that enables developers to build apps for the older version of Hangouts video calls. New apps cannot be created but existing apps will continue to run until April 25th, 2017. We have carefully considered this change and believe that the latest updates allow us to give our users a more targeted Hangouts desktop video experience going forward.”
Sony – January 4 – Sony’s new LMX-001 display allows companies to fully customize their AR solutions – “With the LMX-001 holographic waveguide display, companies can develop customized augmented reality (AR) solutions tailored for specific use cases. The waveguide display can be integrated into a range of products such as protective eyewear, motorcycle helmets, lab glasses and any other type of solutions where the user benefits from getting real-time information directly in the field of view.”

 

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David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/