API

AT&T inducts Watson speech recognition for app development

AT&T is looking for help in making its speech recognition software ultra-consumer oriented. The mobile carrier announced today that its Watson Speech application programming interfaces, or API, is now open to developers.

AT&T's Watson, not to be confused with IBM's Watson, is software that the company aims to program to learn different accents, speaker variations, background environments, platform variations, dialects, and speech patterns, according to a company blog post today.

"It's a technology that's been a long time in development and more than 600 patents in the making, and we're … Read more

Facebook shuts down Face.com APIs, Klik app

Less than a month after Face.com was acquired by Facebook, the social network is shutting down the facial-recognition software company's APIs.

The software company made a splash in 2009 when it released Photo Tagger, a free third-party application for Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to automatically tag photos of people, as well as a recognition-based alert service for Facebook. In 2010, Face.com released an open API to the public that allowed third-party developers to incorporate the technology in their apps.

However, according to an e-mail reprinted by The Next Web, Face.com representatives have begun notifying … Read more

Cloud games mean sweet streams for Sony

Don't care how, just watch Monday's Update now:

The future PlayStation experience could involve streaming your video games. Sony is buying the cloud-based game provider Gaikai for $380 million in shares. Gaikai lets you stream games like Mass Effect 3 with just an Internet connection. No downloading. No discs. Gaikai began working with Samsung and LG to bring video games to Smart TVs. This acquistion could cause a few ripple effects in the gaming industry, not to mention we could be seeing streaming as an option for a future Playstation device. It could even expand the Playstation footprint … Read more

Twitter developers dismayed by promise of stricter API rules

Twitter's announcement that it will tighten the rules governing its APIs sent a shock wave through the developer community, leaving many feeling jilted by the microblogging service and worried about the direction the company is heading.

Ending a policy that had been in effect for the past two-and-a-half-years, Twitter announced Friday it planned to institute stricter rules for its application programming interface to ensure that "the core Twitter consumption experience" includes "a consistent set of products and tools."

In a company blog post announcing the forthcoming policy, consumer product manager Michael Sippey discussed broadening its &… Read more

Dolphin gets a Garage to stash add-ons

SAN FRANCISCO--Tugging on Chrome's coat tails, the popular Dolphin browser has announced alongside the Google I/O developer conference a new framework for developers called Dolphin Garage.

Garage is an open API program for extending the functionality of Dolphin. Powered in part by Adobe Phonegap and Dolphin's own HTML5 framework called Engine, it will include the release of more than 150 APIs, which will allow developers to create their own add-ons for the browser.

Engine has proven to be a big boon for Dolphin, explained David Dehghan, technical architect at Dolphin. While at a W3C Web standards meeting … Read more

Google slashes price 88% for using Google Maps API

Google has announced an 88 percent price cut for those using Google Maps on high-traffic Web sites and services.

The move, which Google Maps API product manager Thor Mitchell announced yesterday, comes a few days before the developer-oriented Google I/O show and two weeks after Apple ditched Google Maps for the upcoming iOS 6.

Google lets others embed Google Maps on their own sites and services through the Google Maps API, or application programming interface. When Google announced new limits to Google Maps usage last October, Mitchell said at the time, "We need to secure its long-term future … Read more

Flipboard becomes prominent Google+ partner

Google isn't ready to open up a Google+ interface to just anybody yet, but it has done so with one important partner, Flipboard.

An application programming interface (API) lets third-party software tap into a service, and opening the Google+ API will let people use Flipboard to read and publish Google+ posts and to comment on those posts.

Bradley Horowitz, the Google vice president of product management in charge of Google+, announced the move at the LeWeb conference in London. He showed off a prototype of the Google+-connected Flipboard software on an Apple iPad, but didn't say when … Read more

Judge William Alsup: Master of the court and Java

For several weeks, U.S. District Judge William Alsup showed that he was the smartest person in the courtroom as high-priced lawyers for Google and Oracle pleaded their cases. On Thursday afternoon, he basically slammed the door in Oracle's face, explaining in a 41-page ruling that the 37 Java APIs used in Google's Android platform do not fall under U.S. copyright laws. The ruling on APIs followed a jury verdict on May 23 that absolved Google of violating two Oracle patents.

Oracle was asking for more than $1 billion in damages, but in the end the jury … Read more

Judge says 37 Oracle APIs are not copyrightable

The structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 Java APIs at question in the Oracle v. Google case are not copyrightable, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California said in a ruling today.

However, it's a narrow ruling that only covers the APIs at question in the copyright phase of this case.

Oracle had sued Google over copyright infringement related to the use of 37 Java APIs used on the Android mobile operating system. Google argued they were free to use because the Java programming language is free to use, and the APIs are … Read more