The Enlighten API is created by Thinkudo Labs and allows text analytics and other functionality for companies, to create their own social monitoring dashboard. 

The API comes with three different plans:

- $10/month

- $500/month

- $1,000/month

Thinkudo Labs was founded in 2012, from a team of developers coming out from SkyScanner and Hewlett-Packard.

If you want to hack on it, just sign up on Mashape using the coupon "thinkudo".

Happy coding ;)

Mashape now autogenerates Erlang clients for all APIs!

The same as all other supported languages, the clients provide both syncronhous and asyncronhous requests. For the Erlang clients you can provide either a function to be run on completion of the request or a Pid for a process that the result of the request will be sent upon completion.

Downloading a client comes with all the necessary Erlang dependencies to get started, ibrowse and mochiweb, as well as the Mashape Erlang application emashape which is the core common functionality between all Erlang Mashape clients. They also come with both a sinan and rebar config for easy use with either Erlang build tool.

Let's look at an example of the client in action. We'll use the Chatterbox API for this example.

setup(PublicKey, PrivateKey) ->  

classifytext(Lang, Text) ->

classifytext(Lang, Text, Optional) when is_list(Optional) ->

classifytext(Lang, Text, Callback) ->

classifytext(Lang, Text, Optional, Callback) ->

First, there is the setup/2 function that takes your Mashape public and private key, starts required dependencies and creates a new process for handling required state for making requests. For this client we have only one endpoint to make requests to, but multiple definitions. The classifytext function can be as simple as the first definition where you provide only the language of the text and the text itself and the classification is returned. The other three allow for optional paramters, a callback or both. Optional parameters for the request must be passed as a proplist, in this case the only optional paramter is 'exclude' so it would look like: [{"exlude", "value"}]. 

You can get the core application, emashape, on github: http://github.com/Mashape/mashape-erlang-client-library/

Installing the Mashape application to your lib directory simplifies the use of the clients. You can install it by copying lib/emashape-* and the contents of deps/ to the lib of your Erlang install, example /usr/local/erlang/lib/. 

It will be a busy week! 

Erlang passionate? Come at the biggest Erlang Conference in the world! March 26-31. Mashape is proudly supporting the event and will be a speaker during the Erlounge.

http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012 

Whant to learn more about tools? 2600hz has organized an amazing conference. Mashape will be there as a speaker with Tristan Sloughter.

http://unconference2012.eventbrite.com

Hope to see you in one of these and would love to chat! We're also hiring.

The API can be found here.

In January, the long time leader in the photo/camera industry filled for the Chapter 11 and is shutting down a lot of divisions to arrive afloat for the bankruptcy. It's even selling more than 1,100 digital image patents to cover the continuos quarterly loss. The company has around $5.1 billion in asset but $6.8 billion in debt.

Yes, Eastman Kodak the company that has invented among other things, the digital camera and handheld camera, files for bankruptcy, after having innnovated for more than 130 years. Recently, the company has been struggling for years, to adapt to an increasingly digital world; since 2003 it has closed 13 manufacturing plants, 130 processing labs and reduced the workforce by 47,000. In some ways it reminds me Apple in 1996. Apple created the PC market, and Kodak created the camera film back in 1880, they both lost their soul at one point. I hope Kodak can find it again, as Apple did. A Kodak camera was used on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

It's always sad when you see an iconic brand, which somehow I assimilate with my childhood's memories, going away, forever. I beat, everybody will recoginze this:

Kodak has already done a big pivot to save itself. Instead of designing it's own cameras, will try to license its own brand to other camera makers, also in the last decate they put a lot of effort in the printing business. As they mentioned in the Chapter 11 petition; since 2003 the company have invested havily in inkjet printers and has been working to transform itself from a business primarly based on film and consumer photography to a smaller business with a digital growth strategy focused on the commmercialization of proprietary digital imaging and printing technologies.

In the near future no one will print photos regurarly, like we did in late '90 with every camera roll, our camera roll is now digital, we store the best pictures in the cloud, shared via Dropbox, Box or iCloud and add them to our digital photo frame. Actually it was this transition from film to digital that has led some problems to Kodak back at the beginning of the millenium. BUT... I believe that we'll still print few amazing pictures that we want to keep forever, and print them in a huge size to attach them on the wall of our bedrooms or living rooms, like a wallpaper. 

They basically need to trasform a camera roll (and all the fuctionalities realted with the priting) into an API. And it's because of all the know-how they have, IPs, the brand and 10 years of investments in the printing business that they should leverage all this, and become a platform, in the cloud, by launching a set of APIs and beginning with a RESTful Print API.

For example a simple Kodak Print API could have these Endpoints: 

Get Order Quote  

GET https://api.kodak.com/v1/print/orderquote

Parameters

APIkeys

paper

size

color

quantity

pngurl (the URL of the PNG you wish to print)

shippingchoice

fullname

streetaddress

apartment

city

state

postalcode

phone

email (optional)

Results

ProductPrice

ShippingPrice

TotalPrice

Example "JSON"

{"PhotoPrice":"15.00","ShippingPrice":"10.00","TotalPrice":"25.00"}

Place Order

POST https://api.kodak.com/v1/print/placeorder

Parameters

apikey

paper

size

color

quantity

pngurl (the URL of the PNG you wish to print)

shippingchoice

fullname

streetaddress

apartment

city

state

postalcode

phone

email (optional)

payment method

cctype

ccnumber

ccpostalcode

ccname

ccexpirationmonth

ccexpirationyear

Results

oderid

Example "JSON"

{"OrderId":"15-73925-09613"}

Get Order Status

GET https://api.kodak.com/v1/print/orderstatus/{id}

Parameters

APIkeys

orderid

Results

status

submitted

Example "JSON"

{"Status":"Printing","Submitted":"2012-02-20T11:30:45"}

They have already created some SDKs for developers. But their are doing it wrong!

Kodak APIs can be a big business since the beginnng. They can integrate their APIs into Facebook, Instagram, dating sites, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare, Flickr and any web and mobile app that has photos as part of their core. This means, reaching almost the entire Internet population = 2 billion of people.

I think that those people are willing to print at least the 2 best pictures every year and have them shipped at home as a big wallpaper. By providing a frustration-free way to print and ship your best moments, without even leave the site you are in, you're going to increase the conversion of people that will pay Kodak to have this kind of all-inclusive service. 

Only via APIs you can achieve that kind of integration into third party products and platforms.

Assuming that the avarage price per order is $25 and that out of 2 billion potential customers only 1% are going to effectively buy the service (two times a year); this is what comes out:

Yearly Revenue? $25 "price" x 2 "orders/year" x 20M "1% of 2 billion people" = $1 billion.

The new printing era is via APIs, and Kodak still has a big brand and know-how to leverage worldwide. 

Mashape is revolutionizing the way data and services are distributed and consumed. We’re a fast-growing, online marketplace for APIs. We’re not disrupting a market, we’re creating one. We’re backed by top tier VCs in the world such NEA, Index Ventures and Charles River Ventures; as well as outstanding angels such Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors.

Mashape is looking for a software designer (yes a designer, because you’re an artist, you design the software) that is truly passionate about creating scalable solutions and solving frontend problems. You will have the opportunity to have a huge impact as an early member. Our ideal candidate has a CS background, but we are most interested in you as a person.  

This quick search on Indeed demonstrates the thesis that we have always believed at Mashape. More and more developers are required to grow the API economy. Startups, are starting to hire API evangelists and API engineers. And we should note that those positions would never have existed just 5 years ago.

Indeed.com searches millions of jobs from thousands of job sites, this job trends graph shows relative growth for jobs we find matching "API".

Chatterbox Analytics (a spin-out company from Queen Mary, University of London) are pleased to announce the release of the new sentiment detection API for social texts. This API is designed specifically to classify short social messages, such as tweets, into positive or negative categories. The system uses advanced statistical models trained (they have partnered with Intel to use their super computer for model training) on 68 million tweets, meaning the detection can handle slang, common misspellings, emoticons, hashtags, etc.

The API comes in two flavors, a free version and a paid-for version which gives users more flexibility;  the system currently supports English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.