Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 2, Number 5

by David I | May 26, 2017 | APIs, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |

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

Twilio – May 25, 2017 – Twilio Announces Proxy — Next Generation API for Building Private and Moderated Conversations with Customers – “Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform for developers, today announced Twilio Proxy, a new API to power private text and voice conversations between a customer and a mobile worker. Any business with a mobile workforce can now enable workers to connect with customers using their own device, while providing a layer of privacy and security to both the worker and the customer.”
Microsoft – May 24, 2017 – Microsoft R Open: The Enhanced R Distribution v3.4.0 is now available – “Microsoft R Open, formerly known as Revolution R Open (RRO), is the enhanced distribution of R from Microsoft Corporation. The current release, Microsoft R Open 3.4.0, is based the statistical language R-3.4.0 and includes additional capabilities for improved performance, reproducibility and platform support. Just like R, Microsoft R Open 3.4.0 is open source and free to download, use, and share.”
Google, IBM, Lyft – May 24 2017 – Introducing Istio: A robust service mesh for microservices – “Google, IBM, and Lyft are proud to announce the first public release of Istio: an open source project that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices. Our current release is targeted at the Kubernetes environment; we intend to add support for other environments such as virtual machines and Cloud Foundry in the coming months.”
Amazon AWS – May 22, 2017 – New AWS Training and Certification Portal – “The new AWS Training and Certification Portal allows you to access and manage your training and certification activities, progress, and benefits – all in one place. Previously, you had to rely on multiple websites to find and manage training and certification offerings. Now you have a central place where you can find and enroll in AWS Training, register for AWS Certification exams, track your learning progress, and access benefits based on the AWS Certifications you have achieved.”
Google – May 18, 2017 – What’s next for Google payment and loyalty experiences – “Yesterday, we announced the Google Payment API, which lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube.”
JetBrains – May 17, 2017 – Kotlin on Android. Now official – “Today, at the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. We believe this is a great step for Kotlin, and fantastic news for Android developers as well as the rest of our community. We’re thrilled with the opportunities this opens up. For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chance to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity.”
Google – May 17, 2017 – Build and train machine learning models on our new Google Cloud TPUs – “We’re excited to announce that our second-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are coming to Google Cloud to accelerate a wide range of machine learning workloads, including both training and inference. We call them Cloud TPUs, and they will initially be available via Google Compute Engine. Each of these new TPU devices delivers up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance. As powerful as these TPUs are on their own, though, we designed them to work even better together.”
Silver Spring Networks – May 16, 2017 – Silver Spring Networks Expands IoT Developer Program – “Silver Spring Networks, Inc. announced the extension of its developer program with the introduction of a new developer portal, developer kits and a simulation tool for application development. Silver Spring aims to accelerate innovation for the Internet of Important Things. Support for the Arduino developer environment, the simplification of software tools, and the new developer portal will broaden the potential devices and applications that can integrate Silver Spring’s IoT technology into solutions for utilities, cities and industrial companies.”
Google – May 16, 2017 – Introducing Google Cloud IoT Core: for securely connecting and managing IoT devices at scale – “Announcing a new fully-managed Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service called Google Cloud IoT Core. Cloud IoT Core makes it easy for you to securely connect your globally distributed devices to GCP, centrally manage them and build rich applications by integrating with our data analytics services. When used as part of a broader Google Cloud IoT solution, Cloud IoT Core gives you access to new operational insights that can help your business react to, and optimize for, change in real time.”
Microsoft – May 10, 2017 – Azure Cosmos DB: The industry’s first globally-distributed, multi-model database service – “Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB is the first globally-distributed data service that lets you to elastically scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions while guaranteeing low latency, high availability and consistency – backed by the most comprehensive SLAs in the industry. Azure Cosmos DB is built to power today’s IoT and mobile apps, and tomorrow’s AI-hungry future.”
Oracle – May 10, 2017 – Oracle API Platform Cloud Enables Customers to Drive Business Transformation and API-First Thinking – “Oracle today expanded Oracle Cloud Platform’s integration offerings with the availability of Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. Bringing together leading API-first design and governance capabilities from recently acquired Apiary and API management from Oracle, the new cloud service delivers end-to-end capabilities for designing, prototyping, documenting, testing, and managing the proliferation of critical APIs.”
Unsplash – May 9, 2017 – The Unsplash API is now open & free – “It’s never been easier to make something awesome with Unsplash photos. Oh boy. The moment you’ve been waiting for is finally here. Assuming you’ve been waiting for us to make an announcement about the Unsplash API… Or were you expecting something else? A .gif perhaps? Have we satisfied your .gif cravings? Good, now let’s get down to business: the Unsplash API is now 100% open and free to outside developers.”
NVIDIA – May 8, 2017 – NVIDIA Releases VRWorks Audio and 360 Video SDKs at GTC – “NVIDIA is making VR more immersive, and VR development easier, with the release of VR audio and 360-degree video stitching as part of our VRWorks software development kit. The VRWorks Audio SDK provides real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments, and is supported in Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. The VRWorks 360 Video SDK addresses the complex challenge of real-time video stitching.”
Google – April 27, 2017 – Introducing the Google Assistant SDK – “With this SDK you can now start building your own hardware prototypes that include the Google Assistant, like a self-built robot or a voice-enabled smart mirror. This allows you to interact with the Google Assistant from any platform.”
Shopify – April 20, 2017 – Building for Developer Success with Shopify’s Newest APIs – “In building more paths to more entrepreneurs, we hope you can use these new APIs to help pave the road for entrepreneurial success. To make marketing better for merchants, and to improve how these apps show their strength, we’re introducing the Marketing Events API. With the new Reporting API, we’re giving all developers the ability to generate customized, app-specific reports.”
Apple – April 20, 2017 – Introducing LivePhotosKit JS – “This new JavaScript-based API makes it easy to embed Live Photos on your websites. In addition to enabling Live Photos on iOS and macOS, you can now let users display their Live Photos on the web.”
Facebook – April 18, 2017 – Messenger Platform 2.0 Debuts at F8 – “Today at F8, we introduced Messenger Platform 2.0, a new suite of tools that gives you the ability to build richer experiences, get discovered, and extend the conversational, visual and social capabilities of your bots. With more than 1.2 billion monthly users and over 100,000 monthly active bots, we are focused on learning and building for our developers.”
TeleSign – April 18, 2017 – Taking on the $8B Communications Platform as a Service Market – “Today we open our premium global network, proprietary data intelligence and innovative communications and security APIs, enjoyed by 20 of the 25 largest brands in the world, to a wider developer audience for the first time via a new self-service portal at www.telesign.com/go”
Apple – April 11, 2017 – What’s New in TestFlight – “TestFlight in iTunes Connect now provides multiple build support, enhanced group capabilities, and improved tester management—making it even easier to test your apps. TestFlight now lets you distribute and test multiple builds at the same time, so testers can choose from a number of builds to test.”

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/