Data Science Toolkit is a very original resource which provides free access to various valuable data like:
street address to coordinates
ip address to coordinates
file to text (converts PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets to text)
and much more.
These data can be reached via the API provided or every part of it is offered as a ready-to-install VM (virtual machine) where you can install to any server (or locally) for limitless API usage.
The API is REST with JSON results + there are also command line, Python and JavaScript interfaces.
Also, besides the VM, an EC2 AMI is ready for instant deployment to the Amazon's cloud.
What do we know about developers? What can we deduce about what they don’t do?
We can make the educated guess that open source developers are unfamiliar and not really interested in the “one stack fits all” approach that the enterprise giants still battle to control.
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I was reminded of this in a post by Michael Cote, recapping his time last week at the Microsoft Management Summit. Microsoft sometimes seems obsessed with VMware. Cote argues that both companies have a different foe:
I’d say the real enemy of both of these companies is the vast, un-quantifiable mass of open source developers out there who don’t want allegiance to any vendor – not to mention the public cloud IaaS and PaaS options out there (how exactly “cloud development” plays out with the ages-old lockin/closed source/single vendor stack architectural decisions is incredibly murky at this point). Clearly, with moves like buying WaveMaker, you can see some pitched VMW v. MSFT battles involving Lightswitch and other post-VB RAD development. As I told one Microsoft executive, if VMWare buys into an entirely different, non-Java ecosystem (e.g., Engineyard for Ruby, Zend for PHP, etc.), then it’d be time to doff the foil-hats for the real helmets.
The citizen developer is not an enterprise creation. The platform providers understand this and are catering to this developer community in a wholly different manner than the large enterprise vendors. Granted, there is a greater push on the part of the enterprise to reach out to developers. Still, developers are autonomous and prefer the independent nature and the culture that comes with being part of a community that controls how they program.
This past week, a new startup called DotCloud, raised $10 million. Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang participated in the funding. DotCloud is a platform that will compete against Windows Azure, Google App Engine and EngineYard.
In an interview this week, Solomon Hykes, Co-Founder and CEO of DotCloud talked about the issues that developers face. Often, developers are encumbered by systems administration issues such as monitoring, scaling, backups, redundancy and upgrade management. They are forced to choose one programming language. On DotCloud, the system adminstration work can be offloaded. The developers can choose to use Ruby for its Web-front end and Java on the back-end. That’s different than platforms such as Heroku, which is a Ruby-based and Google App Engine, which caters to people who are trained in Python.
Hykes says the target is the enterprise. And that shows something larger than just DotCloud. The demand in this world will be for platforms that gives developers the power to customize.
That’s the sea change. Its evidence is in the developer community and the DevOps movement. It’s what makes the latest round of innovation so compelling. It’s not the cloud. It’s the people who are innovating and developing on their own terms, with any stack they decide to choose.
Akshay Patil became a software engineer at Google almost seven years ago. Now the product manager for Google Realtime, the Google tool to search Tweets and other real-time updates from around the Web, Patil announced this morning that he’s leaving Google to become the new Platform Evangelist for location-based social network Foursquare.
That’s a huge coup for Foursquare and a sign the startup will likely put a major new focus on working with outside companies and services to build on top of the set of check-ins and tips it’s amassing about venues around the world, people who patronize them and their interests. The social software developer ecosystem could really use a strong show of support, after Twitter’s recent moves have left many independent developers feeling burned.
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Above: Akshay Patil loves Foursquare and knows where to get a good beer.
The Foursquare Application Development Interface has been relatively underutilized to date. It’s a sound bet that the man who managed integration of Twitter search and much more into one of the biggest shifts in Google’s history (going real time) is going to throw serious fuel on the fire of the location service’s platform next. Patil also worked on and announced the real-time-ification of Google Blogsearch in 2009. Business Insider saw today’s announcement about his move first, though that outlet didn’t have much to say about it.
Foursquare launched a radically new version of its mobile app earlier this month that included an ambitious and very well executed new recommendations feature. The service remains relatively small in its number of users, but it’s innovative far out of proportion and deeply inspiring to geeks and business owners small and large.
If Patil can bring some real-time savvy, some big-platform development skills and some Google-scale industry contacts to the Foursquare platform, some very big things could happen.
Skepticism abounds, however, about the long-term developer-friendliness of super-hot venture-funded startups-as-platforms.
“The controversy around the changes in Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers has made it much harder to lure startups onto platforms like Foursquare’s,” says leading social data developer and ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden. “By bringing in such a heavy-hitter, the company is showing how serious it is about overcoming that reluctance.”
Akshay Patil became a software engineer at Google almost seven years ago. Now the product manager for 