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APIs Coming Out Of The United Kingdom

I was able to update my API monitoring system to include the location of some of the APIs, allowing me to look at APIs by country and region. In preparation for API Strategy & Practice in Amsterdam, I'm taking a closer look at what API innovation is coming out of Europe--first up the United Kindom.

I knew about some of the APIs like Datasift and The Guardian, but I enjoyed learning about the other 35 API companies that I discovered. I was only able to find the location of about 700 of the over 2000 API companies that I track on, but will continue to update the rest of the APIs as I can.


Aculab Cloud

Aculab Cloud presents programmable telephony resources in a cloud-based platform. Through the use of simple high-level APIs (.NET and Python). Aculab Cloud makes it easy to create applications that make, receive and interact with calls with no specialist telephony equipment needed. Aculab Cloud leverages Aculab’s core expertise by combining complex technologies into a powerful, flexible and easy to use platform that offers a cost effective way to build telephony applications or add telephony features to their solutions.


AddLive

AddLive is a simple, developer friendly way to integrate live video and voice into applications. We see great opportunity in real-time applications, and believe that live video and voice will be used in many apps. Our aim is to empower the developer community to build tomorrow’s real-time applications by giving them easy access to this technology.


Adfonic

Adfonic is the smarter mobile advertising buying platform that gives advertisers and agencies broad access to global mobile web and app inventory through a single buying point. Adfonic’s customers run thousands of performance, rich media and video ad campaigns monthly across a wide range of inventory sources to drive direct response, increase consumer engagement and build brand awareness.


Adzuna

Adzuna aims to become the leading search engine for classified ads, globally. The service aggregates and semantically analyses millions of ads and 000s of information sources returning the most relevant local search results to users. Adzuna is a search engine that makes finding classified ads relevant to you much, much easier. By aggregating information from a huge array of job boards, property portals, car dealers, classified destinations, social networks and other sources from across the web, Adzuna returns abundant but highly relevant search results to users. Like Kayak in travel, Adzuna aims to turn a search engine into a destination.


Aepona

Aepona Ltd. provides application-led products and services to telecommunications operators worldwide. Its Universal Service Platform allows service creation and implementation to be carried out within the service network from underlying network resources. Aepona, Ltd. serves customers in Europe, North America, and South East Asia.


Altmetric

Altmetric tracks mentions of scholarly works on social media sites, scholarly bookmarking services and in science news outlets. It handles all of the heavy lifting involved in extracting, disambiguating and collating this information so that you can focus on your core product. The Altmetric API gives you programmatic access the data about articles & datasets collected by Altmetric.


Betable

Betable, the real-money gaming platform, is reinventing entertainment by merging the worlds of gaming and casino-based entertainment. Betable provides the license, support and infrastructure that allow developers to legally integrate real-money gaming into their mobile and social games and applications. Betable is dedicated to providing players with world-leading security, player location and identity verification to keep their funds safe and to ensure responsible gaming. The company is privately held and is headquartered in London, England with an office in San Francisco, California.


Blueleaf

Currently in private alpha, Blueleaf will completely revolutionize the way users see and manage all of your investments - 401(k)s, IRA, 529s, brokerage, and other accounts. With Blueleaf’s planning, collaboration, and data tools, users will finally be able to see how all your investments work together and make the right choices to ensure users are on track to meet your financial goals.


Boliven

Boliven hosts a searchable online database of over 100 million scientific documents. The site is targeted to both end users of science literature and patents, and to information professionals. Boliven enables professionals to rapidly identify novel technologies, clients, partners, commercialisation opportunities and ideas. The company’s BolivenPRO service gives users the ability to search and systemise the Boliven database, analyse results using powerful analytic tools, download and share relevant work lists.


CloudMade

CloudMade, co-founded by long-time OSM contributor Nick Black, powers many market leading location and map based applications from prominent mobile and web developers. Its mapping platform and tools enable thousands of developers and organizations around the world to create innovative geo-enabled products. CloudMade provides third-party developers, operators, mobile phone and PND manufacturers with everything they need to build compelling location based products. From map tiles and metadata to turn-by-turn navigation and location based advertising.


DataSift

DataSift is the leading social data platform, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. Delivered as a cloud platform, DataSift does the heavy lifting for companies creating social media monitoring, social CRM, business intelligence, financial trading and news monitoring applications. DataSift is a certified Twitter data reseller partner.


Decibel

Decibel operate a platform that supplies rich, semantic music product metadata APIs and digital assets to businesses in the broadcast, media and digital sectors. These data-driven assets power the creation of Connected TV, mobile, tablet and web applications, business intelligence, consumer electronics, digital retail outlets and a set global standards for communication and collaboration across the media industries.


GoSquared

GoSquared helps you understand and improve your online presence. GoSquared creates two web applications for monitoring your website’s traffic in real-time - Dashboard and Trends. Dashboard is a real-time traffic monitoring app that gives you an overview of your website’s traffic right now - in a single glance. It lets you see which pages of your site are most popular, where your visitors are coming from, and info on every visitor currently browsing your website along with how they’re browsing (what browser, operating system, screen size, etc.), which language they’re speaking, and what city they’re from. Dashboard doesn’t just tell you who’s on your site, it also knows what page they’re on, and what pages they’ve been on. It know’s where they’ve come from (Twitter, Digg, Google, etc.) making it easy to see when someone’s talking about you. Trends takes all the data in Dashboard and builds beautiful, easy to read charts and tables so that you can analyse how your website has been performing over the past day, week, month, or year. Trends enables you to gain insights into your website’s traffic data quicker than ever before - without having to click a single button.


Guardian

We are increasingly opening our tools and resources to create more opportunity for application developers. Whether you want to reach wider audiences, engage users more deeply or develop innovative advertising campaigns we have a range of services that can accelerate your digital ambitions. The Guardian Open Platform is now open for business.


Huddle

Established in 2006, Huddle creates cloud-based collaboration and content management software for the enterprise. Its patent-pending intelligent technology locates and recommends valuable information to users, with no need for search. Huddle is used by more than 100,000 business and government organizations worldwide, including the central US and UK government, AKQA, HTC and Kia Motors, to securely store, share and collaborate on content with people inside and outside of their organization. Huddle can be accessed online, on desktops and on the move with BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad apps.


import.io

Importio turns the web into a database, releasing the vast potential of data trapped in websites. Allowing you to identify a website, select the data and treat it as a table in your database. In effect transform the data into a row and column format. You can then add more websites to your data set, the same as adding more rows and query in real-time to access the data.


Judo Pay

judo payments provides mobile payment solutions to thousands of businesses across the UK to ensure they never lose a sale. From integrated card payments for mobile apps to providing the tools to build a custom mobile payment system for third parties, judo makes mobile credit and debit card acceptance simple and affordable. Businesses can sign up with judo directly through the website or by consulting one of over 300 certified sales representatives.


Last.fm

Last.fm is a social networking company which revolves around its music recommendation engine. It offers events, wiki-created artist profiles and discographies and community forums. Unlike competitor Pandora, Last.fm’s recommendations are not generated by matching similar musical attributes, instead it offers internet radio stations programmed by comparing user data to the rest of the Last.fm user community. This data is submitted (or “scrobbled” to use the company’s terminology) via more than 600 devices and media players.


Mendeley

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.


miiCard

miiCard (My Internet Identity) is a global Identity as a Service solution that proves ‘you are who you say you are’, purely online, in minutes and to the same level as a physical passport or photo ID check. Through a patented process that leverages the trust between an individual and their financial institution, miiCard establishes identity to Level of Assurance 3+ and meets Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering identity guidelines, enabling the sale of regulated products and services purely online. Combining online identity proofing with strong authentication, miiCard provides the trust and security required for people and businesses to meet and transact with confidence in a purely digital environment.


Mixcloud

Mixcloud is an online music streaming service that allows for the listening and distribution of radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts, which are crowdsourced by its registered users. Its notable users include Wired, Harvard Business School, TED Talks, and Barack Obama. Mixcloud was originally funded by its founders only and continues to be owned solely by its team.


Mopapp

Easy sales analytics for all mobile apps. Mopapp helps developers and publishers to track and analyze their apps revenues from all major online stores (Apple App Store, Google Android Market, GetJar, RIM App World, Appia, MobiHand) and major mobile Ad networks (AdMob) through automatic data aggregation and easy-to-understand reports. It exposes an API to track sales also from 3rd party stores or custom ecommerce scripts.


Nexmo

Nexmo is a cloud SMS API for that lets you send and receive high volume messages at wholesale rates. Sending and receiving SMS at affordable cost on a global scale is a complex and costly challenge. To optimize deliverability and reach, businesses must connect to multiple mobile carriers, install and operate their own infrastructure, build data analytics and use decades old protocols. Additionally, many third-party SMS solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.


PayLane

PayLane.com is an online payments provider that offers accepting payments in 160 currencies from around the world. Besides the most popular payments methods, such as credit and debit cards, wire transfers or PayPal, PayLane also offers solutions characteristic for specific European markets. Thanks to plugins for ecommerce platforms, descriptors, single-click and recurring payments, PayLane is more than just accepting payments – it’s a way to boost your business internationally. PayLane’s offering is directed both at the biggest international companies and new businesses – having once been a startup themselves, PayLane supports even the smallest companies by enabling them to accept payments.


Pearson

The company behind Penguin Books, the Financial Times and multiple education businesses now has a developer platform. Explore and test our APIs, and build your own applications using our exciting content.


PeerIndex

PeerIndex is a London-based company providing social media analytics based on footprints from use of major social media services (currently Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora). Part of an emerging group of Social Media Analytics providers, PeerIndex helps social media contributors assess and score their influence and benefit from the social capital they have built up. PeerIndex currently tracks approximately 45 million Twitter profiles, making the company one of the leaders in its sector.


Postcode Anywhere

Postcode Anywhere is a UK-based company best known for its market-leading ‘what’s your postcode’ technology, used to quickly complete your address when buying online. It was established by Guy Mucklow and Jamie Turner in 2001. By seeing the internet value as a much more efficient information delivery medium than traditional methods - which typically involved burning data onto CDs and shipping out to the customer - Postcode Anywhere has turned the market upside down.


Pusher

Pusher is a cloud-based service that allows developers to quickly and easily add realtime functionality to webapps. This means that people can create collaborative tools, multiplayer games, chat, realtime dashboards and much more.


Quickblox

QuickBlox is a cloud hosted backend (mBaaS) consisting of 7 modules which developers and publishers can use to add extra functionality to their smartphone, desktop and web/Facebook apps. Enterprise clients usually have system running on their own servers / AWS infrastructure managed by QuickBlox team. This provides flexibility, security and control necessary for enterprise sector. Quickblox's ready-to-go modules add new functionality, reduce development time & cost, add scalability, and quicken time to market.


ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki is a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wiki" means that any user with programming experience can create or edit such programs for extracting new data, or for analyzing existing datasets. The main use of the website is providing a place for programmers and journalists to collaborate on analyzing public data


Seatwave

 

Seatwave is a UK-based fan-to-fan ticket marketplace, where fans can buy and sell tickets for concerts, theatre, sports and other live events. Sellers list tickets for free, only giving Seatwave a portion of the sale price when the ticket is sold. Buyers pay for tickets through the Seatwave site, guaranteeing secure payment and the timely arrival of tickets. Seatwave launched its iOS SDK in December 2011.


Server Density

Server Density is a web application that monitors important server metrics such as load average and memory usage alerting you via e-mail or SMS when things go wrong. Available as a hosted service or standalone, installed on your own servers, each monitored server runs a lightweight, open source monitoring agent which reports data back every 60 seconds. Reported data is graphed for the last 30 days, or the time range you specify. Graphs are zoomable and the highest, lowest and average values over the time period are displayed for each check.


Songkick

Songkick is a website and service that provides personalised news about live music events. It allows users to track their favorite bands and receive email alerts when a tracked band plays a gig nearby. Songkick is one of the original high tech startups in London's Silicon Roundabout area.


This Is My Jam

This Is My Jam is for sharing one song at a time. Pick the one that means the most to you right now and discover which songs truly matter to your friends. Choose one song. That song that’s been stuck on repeat, that one you love. Personalize it and share it with the world. This is your jam, and it’s yours for up to seven days. Change it whenever you want, but choose wisely. You only have one!


vzaar

vzaar is an online video hosting service, which launched in 2007. The site supports video streaming, embedding, sharing, and video storage. Originally targeted at eBay sellers, the service expanded in 2008 and now provides online video services designed for business and other commercial operations.


Zeebox

zeebox is a social networking and social television platform available for mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 and web. zeebox provides contextual information second-by-second as people watch TV. This information includes which friends are watching the same shows right now and what is seen and heard within the broadcast.


Zemanta

Zemanta is a platform for assisted on-line content production for any web user. A blog, an article or a web page is fed it into its system which then recognizes the content and returns suggested images, smart links, keywords and relevant related stories from the Internet. It can be referenced from a user’s preferred content publishing platform through a plug-in.


 

If there are any UK based API companies I've missed, make sure at let me know @kinlane. Next I'll work my way through each EU country, getting to know more about what API innovation is coming out of the rest of Europe.