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 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/
