James Simmonds

This is a great article by Adam Kleinberg on how a brand and enabling third parties to write exciting applications and mashups targeting new channels via your Api is so important . The resources required to produce a website and accompanying iPhone app can be significant - what if you invested in your business/eCommerce API and a referral/developer programme instead? The world becomes your development partner and ANYONE can start creating applications backed by YOUR business. Take Android as an example - it's gaining market share at such a rapid pace that you will need an Android App soon to stay in the game as it's not a sector you can afford to ignore. Pouring all your money into a specific vendor channel (say iPhone) could mean you are left out in the cold when other technologies/forms/channels become viable. With an API in place it would be a simple, cheaper exercise in creating an Android application on top of the API calls - and the API gives you options in how you...

I'm pleased to make public the fruits of my late nights.... FluentGeoApi ! I previously mentioned that I am working on a private/personal project - well it's got an element of geolocation to it and after a bit of internet research I found GeoAPI.com . In order to interact with GeoAPI I decided to write a fluent style wrapper over the top of it and I've just released v1.0.0.0, a .Net 3.5 C# library to take the pain out of making REST calls and dealing with the GeoJson wire format used by GeoAPI. It's not 100% coverage of the API but I plan on getting there ASAP...however I've implemented Create/Modify/Delete a user entity, Simple and Keyword Search which is enough to release it. If you are working with geolocation data/features in your .Net application I would check out GeoAPI.com - I've been really impressed with what if offers (and if you hit the api < 20,000 times a day it won't cost you a penny!) - hopefully you'll also consider using FluentGe...

I'm starting my own commercial application - can't say too much other than it's going to be built from as much "off the shelf" code/components as possible to reduce the time to market. So I'm doing quite a lot of research into finding my "ingredients" - I'm sure they are out there and want to find them before I resort to rolling my own code and thought I'd post some links I've found. Unfuddle - " Basecamp for developers. I've used Basecamp for nearly two years and like it a lot. It's got some issues but on the whole it's been stable, reliable and no bother to work with. However a colleague recommended Unfuddle as it offers a SourceCode repository (SVN or GIT) as part of its package so my new project is hosted at Unfuddle. Only scratched the surface with it but I like it - especially searchable wiki pages (notebooks) - unlike Basecamps "Writeboard" extension which are not indexed. GeoAPI.com - if you need ...

Inspired by Mitchell & Webbs " NumberWang " I have created " DataWang ".... " DataWang is a .Net library that can generate useful, realistic data for use in the development/mocks/testing process. Based on Google Sets, this library provides a .Net API over the Set functionality (by making http calls and parsing the html response). Google Sets currently does not expose a programmatic API - DataWang provides you with programmatic access to this API! DataWang is a completely extensible framework for mock data generation. It is fully interface driven and all components are dependency injectable. You can provide your own implementations for any of the component interfaces should you wish to extend or modify its behaviour. Google Sets often cannot generate the data you require - so DataWang will manufacture a list based on the results of making multiple Google Set calls - email addresses is a good example (a first name call + "@" + a domain name call). D...