by David I | Feb 1, 2017 | APIs, Developer News, 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
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.”
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/
by David I | Jan 17, 2017 | Developer News, 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
NVIDIA – January 11 – Watch an AI Play Mario Kart – “A developer spent a couple of days over his winter break training an artificial neural network to play the classic racing game Mario Kart 64 and documented his results to share what he learned in the process. ‘It had been a few years since I’d done any serious machine learning, and I wanted to try out some of the new hotness (aka TensorFlow) I’d been hearing about,’ said Kevin Hughes who works as a developer at Shopify.”
Red Hat – January 4 – Red Hat Launches Latest Version of Red Hat CloudForms, Drives Open Hybrid Cloud Management Across Geographies and Industries – “IT operations teams can face slow, manual processes to deliver services internally, which may cost time, money and competitiveness. To address these challenges, IT teams can use Red Hat CloudForms to increase service delivery while enabling IT teams to focus on critical, business-impacting issues.”
Intel – December 21 – MIT Technology Review: Intel Bets It Can Turn Everyday Silicon into Quantum Computing’s Wonder Material – “Competitors IBM, Microsoft, and Google are all developing quantum components that are different from the ones crunching data in today’s computers. But Intel is trying to adapt the workhorse of existing computers, the silicon transistor, for the task.”
Amazon AWS – December 21 – AWS Cost Explorer Update: Reserved Instance Utilization Report – “Cost Explorer is a tool that helps you to manage your AWS spending using reporting and analytics tools . You can sign up with a single click and then visualize your AWS costs, analyze trends, and look at spending patterns. You can look at your spending through a set of predefined views (by service, by linked account, daily, and so forth). You can drill in to specific areas of interest and you can also set up custom filters.”
Mozilla.org – December 20 – Firebug lives on in Firefox DevTools – “As you might have heard already, Firebug has been discontinued as a separate Firefox add-on. The decision was made that the next version of Firebug (codenamed Firebug.next) would build on top of Firefox DevTools, and Firebug would be merged into the built-in tools.”
Roku – December 15 – New web tools for faster development on Roku – “The Developer Dashboard contains many tools to help build beautiful, functioning Roku channels. In October, we added the ability to access crash logs and channel analytics. Now, we’ve introduced three web tools for speedier development, QA testing, and certification testing.”
NVIDIA – December 13 – Share Your Science: The Impact of Deep Learning on Radiology – “Ronald Summers, Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shares how they are trying to improve patient care by increasing the accuracy of radiologic diagnosis with advanced computer techniques. His group is using deep learning and NVIDIA GPUs to assist physicians make a more accurate diagnosis by developing software that improves diagnosis, reduce the chance of errors, and help underserved patients that have limited access to advanced radiology services.”
Google – December 13 – Google Developers YouTube Channel Reaches 1 Million Subscribers! – “Earlier this week, the Google Developers YouTube channel crossed the 1 million subscribers threshold. We’ve shared over 2,000 videos that have been viewed over 100 million times.”
Netflix – December 12 – Netflix Conductor : A microservices orchestrator – “The Netflix Content Platform Engineering team runs a number of business processes which are driven by asynchronous orchestration of tasks executing on microservices. Today, we are open sourcing Conductor to the wider community hoping to learn from others with similar needs and enhance its capabilities.”
Sony – December 12 – New easy-to-use tool for power optimizing your software – “Sony Mobile Research and Incubation department released a beta version of an easy-to-use desktop application, called Otii, that works hand-in-hand with the Power Profiler Kit from Nordic Semiconductor. Connected to the Power Profiler Kit through a regular USB cable, you get an intuitive tool for finding out what parts of your software that is the cause for certain power consumption behaviors. Through the visual user interface you can easily detect power spikes and statistics.”
Yahoo – December 7 – Open Sourcing Screwdriver, Yahoo’s Continuous Delivery Build System for Dynamic Infrastructure – “Continuous Delivery enables software development teams to move faster and adapt to users’ needs quicker by reducing the inherent friction associated with releasing software changes. Now, we are open sourcing an adaptation of our code as Screwdriver.cd, a new streamlined build system designed to enable Continuous Delivery to production at scale for dynamic infrastructure.”
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/
by David I | Dec 13, 2016 | Developer Community, Developer News, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Virtual Reality |
There have been various forms of technology and non-technology based reality since the 1800s. The term “Virtual Reality” (VR) was coined by Jaron Lanier in 1978. Tom Caudell, a Boeing researcher, coined the term “Augmented Reality” (AR) in 1990. In 1994 Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino defined a mixed reality. A more inclusive description is the 1999 Reality-Virtuality [RV] Continuum by Paul Milgram and Herman W. Colquhoun Jr. I’ve had the fun of using Microsoft Kinect (and write code for), Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard in the past. There is so much more happening today with several low cost and high end devices including Facebook Oculus and Microsoft Hololens. Does your developer relations program support different AR/VR/MR devices and APIs? In this blog post I’ll look at some of the recent AR/VR/MR developer news and provide links to developer programs.

People wear Samsung Gear VR devices as they attend the launching ceremony of the new Samsung S7 and S7 edge smartphones during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 21, 2016. REUTERS/Albert Gea TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RTX27XXM
AR/VR/MR Devices and their Developer Programs
Here is a list of AR/VR/MR devices, pricing and links to their developer programs.
AR/VR/MR News
The following are some recent news items and announcements by companies in the AR/VR/MR space. If you know of additional developer news, please send me an email.
Industry AR/VR/MR Site Links
Here is a list of industry and consortium sites that are focused on AR/VR/MR technologies, SDKs, APIs and devices.
- Global Virtual Reality Association – https://www.gvra.com/
- The VR/AR Association – http://www.thevrara.com/
- Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance – http://thearea.org/
- AugmentedReality.org – http://www.augmentedreality.org/
Is your Developer Program involved in AR/VR/MR?
Have I missed some of the devices and software from your company that is involved in AR/VR/MR? Do you have an SDK for developers? Is your company integrating with AR/VR/MR devices and using their developer programs? Send me an email if you have additional links to devices, softtware and 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