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Scandinavian Startups. How to accelerate locally & internationally: STING Accelerate, Startupbootcamp, Seedcamp, Le Camping, Y Combinator, Techstars
Posted on: March 19, 2015
It’s easier to start a new business with the support of experienced mentors and investment from their funds. To get assistance here start-ups can apply for time-limited programs of support from accelerators, and if win they usually get the conditions which allow creating a project that can enter the market and obtain investment. The budding entrepreneurs are provided with office, mentors and a small investment during 3-6 months.
At Altabel Group being focused on working with the Scandinavian companies, including start-ups, we’ve noticed that recently there has been increased interest and efforts to creating efficient environment and conditions for start-ups development. Local accelerators as one of the prerequisites for this are perhaps not so much mature as global leaders like Seedcamp, Y Combinator, Techstars, etc, still are worth considering since they focus on Nordic companies. To name a few: STING Accelerate, Startupbootcamp, which are rather large and well-know, and Startup Sauna, Nestholma Accelerator, that are smaller. Let’s talk about them a little bit more.
Scandinavian accelerators
STING Accelerate (www.stockholminnovation.com)
Where: Stockholm, Sweden
Acceptance of applications: twice a year, 7-8 startups are selected in each session
Duration: 4 months
Statistics: over 200 startups funded, 45,000,000 SEK in total exits, over 535,000,000 SEK in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: investment of 250,000 SEK (roughly 29,600 USD) comes in the form of a convertible note that can be repaid in three years with 6% interest or converted into equity when the startup can issue shares valued at least 1 million SEK to new investors.
Founded in 2002, STING coaches Stockholm startups dealing with internet, media, cleantech and life sciences. It evaluates about 150 to 200 projects annually, but accepts about 20 to participate in its programs such as STING Accelerate and STING Excelerate, which is a less intensive acceleration program. STING Excelerate provides startups with a personal business coach who visits the company at least a half a day per week for 6-18 months to help the company grow.
The received investment at STING Accelerate will help startups to focus more on developing their product and less on raising funds. The program runs in the center of Stockholm at the co-working space SUP46, and selected companies are offered free office space there throughout the program.
Before STING used to accept only Swedish startups, but now it accepts international startups and offer housing in apartments (at self-cost).
Startupbootcamp (www.startupbootcamp.org)
Where: Copenhagen (Denmark) and others (Istanbul (Turkey), Haifa (Israel), London (UK), Amsterdam, Eindhoven (Netherlands), Berlin (Germany))
Acceptance of applications: several times during the year, 10 startup are selected
Duration: 3 months
Statistics: 9 accelerator programs, 130 companies funded, 2 exits, 20,209,661 USD in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: 15,000 EUR in financing for 8% equity.
Founded in 2010, Startupbootcamp created an international network from eight accelerators. Accelerator selects projects from different countries; startups should be able to move to one of the cities of the program. Each startup team will receive 15,000 EUR and other benefits in the amount of 450,000 EUR. Mentors and experts will work with projects during 3 months. In the end startups will be able to present themselves to funds and business angels.
Some programs accept applications from startups of any fields, the others – just from certain areas: media, transport, energy and others. Startupbootcamp accepts applications from startup teams and individual entrepreneurs as well.
Accelerators abroad
In case you didn’t manage to meet deadlines in your home country in Scandinavia, or accelerators abroad seem to be more attractive and suitable for your startup idea, you are welcome to search for international accelerators across Europe or America for funding your startup business. There are few programs, which Altabel considers to be the most interesting ones on the international scene.
Seedcamp (www.seedcamp.com)
Where: London (United Kingdom)
Acceptance of applications: monthly, 2-3 startups are chosen
Duration: 1 week
Statistics: 118 startups funded, 7 exits, 17,000,000 USD in total exits, 131,189,940 USD in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: 50,000 EUR in financing for 8-10% equity.
The largest accelerator in Europe founded in 2007 in London by famous venture capitalist Reshma Sohoni with the support of the British venture capital funds. The company’s portfolio consists of more than a hundred startups from European countries.
Twenty selected startup teams undergo an extensive training during the week, and then present their ideas to investors. Two or three startups receive funding afterwards. In addition to investments in the amount of 50,000 EUR, startups receive a number of possibilities. They can attend a course Seedcamp Academy, during which they are expected to learn a successful way of bringing the project to the market. In addition, teams will be given the opportunity to work in the London office of Google Campus and visit the United States in the educational tour.
Le Camping (www.lecamping.org)
Where: Paris, France
Acceptance of applications: once a year, 12 startups are selected
Duration: 6 months
Statistics: 48 startups funded, 2 exits, 10,000,000 USD in total exits, 9,955,000 USD in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: up to 20,000 EUR in financing for 3% equity, 1,000 EUR – grant for international startups.
Le Camping is a program launched by Silicon Sentier, a well-known organization that brings together innovative companies and entrepreneurs in the web and mobility space. Open to all types of entrepreneurs: entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, non-profits; early-stage startups; international teams and exchange programs; late-stage startups. The Accelerator offers 6-month program with an acceleration phase followed by a special growth phase. 140 mentors will come together to support, advise, critique and ultimately position the startups to write their own success story.
The 12 selected startups will enter an intensive program in Numa – Parisian web entrepreneurship eco-system. 3 months of acceleration are given to go from an idea to demo, then 1 month to meet investors all around Europe. On a Demo Day, at the end of the first 3 months the startup teams will meet around 500 international investors. A financial grant offered by its partners 4,500 EUR is provided to each team participating in Le Camping, without any equity engagement in the startups.
Y Combinator (www.ycombinator.com)
Where: Mountain View, CA, USA
Acceptance of applications: twice a year, spring and autumn, 68 startups are selected in each session
Duration: 3 months: January- May, July-August
Statistics: 747 startups funded, 89 exits, 2,283,808,100 USD in total exits, 4,042,698,709 USD in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: 120,000 USD in financing for 7% equity.
The first accelerator in the USA, founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Paul Graham. During its existence Y Combinator has funded more than 700 startups. According to the founder’s comment, the average estimation of these startups is 22.4 million USD. Scribd, Dropbox and Airbnb – the largest and the most successful companies in Y Combinator’ portfolio.
Selected startup’ teams are invited to Silicon Valley for three months. The program consists of weekly lunches with experts, investors and other entrepreneurs. The course ends with Demo Day, where startups show their results.
Techstars (www.techstars.com)
Where: New York, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Boulder (USA), London (UK)
Acceptance of applications: once a year, 10 startups are selected in the chosen city
Duration: 3,5 months
Statistics: 19 accelerator programs, 502 companies funded, 44 exits, 176,000,000 USD in total exits, 1,148,300,000 USD in total funding raised
Conditions of participation: 18,000 USD in financing for 6% equity and also an opportunity to get a convertible loan in the amount of 51,000 – 100,000 USD.
Founded in 2007 by investors David Cohen and Brad Feld, Techstarts is considered to be the second popular after Y Combinator. Accepts applications from early-stage and late-stage startup’ teams consisting of at least two people. A team of experts works with startups for 3,5 months, and then Demo Day is arranged. The accelerator offers a space for work in each city, as well as additional services necessary for the operation of the company at the initial stage.
Conclusion
Choosing an accelerator depends entirely on your business needs and what you want out of the experience. Some accelerators have themes or focus on certain business sectors such as education, healthcare, or finance. Some are harder to get into as the most popular accelerators are bombarded with applications, making it difficult to get noticed in a sea of startups.
Is anybody planning to apply for one of the programs mentioned above? Have you/your company been through an accelerator? What advice would you give founders who are considering applying to one? That would be interesting to read the comments about real experience from participants, feel free to share your ideas about it.
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Svetlana Pozdnyakova svetlana.pozdnyakova@altabel.com Skype ID: Svetlana.pozdnyakova Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
- In: Cloud | Microsoft
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Microsoft Azure (called Windows Azure before 25 March 2014) is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It is a growing collection of integrated services – compute, storage, data, networking and app.
It provides both PaaS and IaaS services, which for the general public means a powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services. These services let you build, deploy and manage applications any way you like. Its hybrid cloud solution allows you to store data, backup, recover and build applications in your data center and the public cloud.
With cloud and hybrid services expected to reach US$108 billion by 2017, demand for Microsoft’s cloud products including Microsoft Azure is booming. For now:
- 57% of Fortune 500 companies are using Microsoft Azure
- It welcomes 1,000 new customers per day
- Currently 1.2 million businesses and organizations use Microsoft Azure Active Directory
- Microsoft Azure gains two times the compute and storage capacity every 6-9 months
What benefits do companies gain from using Microsoft Azure?
Using a cloud computing platform service like Microsoft Azure provides companies with a number of benefits apart from premium storage space and high-performance. The business benefits include:
- Efficiency – Azure Solutions and Services are known for delivering better-quality products as well as high operational efficiency because of reduced capital costs. Customers and partners can truly realize a huge reduction in total cost of operations and reduced workloads in a small time period.
- Increased scalability to match demand – as your customer base grows and the usage of your application increases you can just add additional capacity to make sure your application is running smoothly. You don’t have to worry about running out of server capacity.
- More flexibility and creativity – applications can very quickly be deployed to the Microsoft Azure platform which means that changes can be applied without any downtime. This makes it an ideal platform for your developers to add functionality to your application.
- Agility – developers would find a host of development tools to take benefit, including automated service management and improved data center presence internationally to reply faster to diverse customer needs.
- Simplicity – Azure makes use of prevailing development skills in familiar languages such as .Net and even open source languages like Java and PHP to produce and manage applications and services.
- Trustworthiness – Windows Azure delivers enterprise-class service with consistent service level agreements based on Microsoft’s unbelievable service experience.
Among Azure customers are such companies as HEINEKEN, GE Healthcare, Temenos, Zespri International, 3M, Skanska USA, Xerox, Diebold which speaks for itself :)
What position does Microsoft Azure takes up in public cloud?
According to Rightscale releases 2015 state of the cloud report Azure is progressing among enterprises, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate in public cloud with 57 percent of technical professionals saying that they run applications on AWS. That’s up from 54 percent a year earlier.
By comparison, Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform and infrastructure posted a combined score of 19 percent. But Microsoft is making gains, posting a 6 point jump in the number of tech professionals using its cloud infrastructure.
Google’s Cloud Platform offerings came in behind Azure, with 8 percent of survey respondents using Google App Engine, and only 5 percent using Google’s infrastructure products.
Microsoft has put huge amount of work towards marketing Azure to large enterprises, so it’s not surprising to see that large businesses are Microsoft’s core customers. There’s also room for that business to grow: a majority of enterprise users responding to the survey said that less than 20 percent of their company’s app portfolio is in the cloud.
What do you think of Microsoft Azure? What future do you predict for it? Thank you for sharing your thoughts :)
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Yuliya Tolkach Yulia.Tolkach@altabel.com Skype ID: yuliya_tolkach Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
The big languages are popular for a reason: They offer a huge foundation of open source code, libraries, and frameworks that make finishing the job easier. Sometimes the vast resources of the popular, mainstream programming languages aren’t enough to solve your particular problem. Sometimes you have to look beyond the obvious to find the right language, where the right structure makes the difference while offering that extra feature to help your code run significantly faster without endless tweaking and optimizing. This language produces vastly more stable and accurate code because it prevents you from programming sloppy or wrong code.
The world is filled with thousands of clever languages that aren’t C#, Java, or JavaScript. Some are treasured by only a few, but many have flourishing communities connected by a common love for the language’s facility in solving certain problems. There may not be tens of millions of programmers, who know the syntax, but sometimes there is value in doing things a little different, as experimenting with any new language can pay significant dividends on future projects.
The following six languages should be on every programmer’s radar. They may not be the best for every job — many are aimed at specialized tasks. But they all offer upsides that are worth investigating and investing in. There may be a day when one of these languages proves to be exactly what your project — or boss — needs.
Erlang: Functional programming for real-time systems
Erlang’s secret is the functional paradigm. Most of the code is forced to operate in its own little world where it can’t corrupt the rest of the system through side effects. The functions do all their work internally, running in little “processes” that act like sandboxes and only talk to each other through mail messages. You can’t merely grab a pointer and make a quick change to the state anywhere in the stack. You have to stay inside the call hierarchy. It may require a bit more thought, but mistakes are less likely to propagate.
The model also makes it simpler for runtime code to determine what can run at the same time. With concurrency so easy to detect, the runtime scheduler can take advantage of the very low overhead in setting up and ripping down a process. Erlang fans like to flourish about running 20 million “processes” at the same time on a Web server.
If you’re building a real-time system with no room for dropped data, such as a billing system for a mobile phone switch, then check out Erlang.
Go: Simple and dynamic
Google wasn’t the first organization to survey the collection of languages, only to find them cluttered, complex, and often slow. In 2009, the company released its solution: a statically typed language that looks like C but includes background intelligence to save programmers from having to specify types and juggle malloc calls. With Go, programmers can have the terseness and structure of compiled C, along with the ease of using a dynamic script language.
While Sun and Apple followed a similar path in creating Java and Swift, respectively, Google made one significantly different decision with Go: The language’s creators wanted to keep Go “simple enough to hold in one programmer’s head.Thus, there are few zippy extras like generics, type inheritance, or assertions, only clean, simple blocks of if-then-else code manipulating strings, arrays, and hash tables.
The language is reportedly well-established inside of Google’s vast empire and is gaining acceptance in other places where dynamic-language lovers of Python and Ruby can be coaxed into accepting some of the rigor that comes from a compiled language.
If you’re a startup trying to catch Google’s eye and need to build some server-side business logic, Go is a great place to start.
Groovy: Scripting goodness for Java
The Java world is surprisingly flexible. Say what you will about its belts-and-suspenders approach, like specifying the type for every variable, ending every line with a semicolon, and writing access methods for classes that simply return the value. But it looked at the dynamic languages gaining traction and built its own version that’s tightly integrated with Java.
Groovy offers programmers the ability to toss aside all the humdrum conventions of brackets and semicolons, to write simpler programs that can leverage all that existing Java code. Everything runs on the JVM. Not only that, everything links tightly to Java JARs, so you can enjoy your existing code. The Groovy code runs like a dynamically typed scripting language with full access to the data in statically typed Java objects. Groovy programmers think they have the best of both worlds. There’s all of the immense power of the Java code base with all of the fun of using closures, operator overloading, and polymorphic iteration.
Finally, all of the Java programmers who’ve envied the simplicity of dynamic languages can join the party without leaving the realm of Java.
CoffeeScript: JavaScript made clean and simple
Technically, CoffeeScript isn’t a language. It’s a preprocessor that converts what you write into JavaScript. But it looks different because it’s missing plenty of the punctuation. You might think it is Ruby or Python, though the guts behave like JavaScript.
CoffeeScript began when semicolon haters were forced to program in JavaScript because that was what Web browsers spoke. Changing the way the Web works would have been an overwhelming task, so they wrote their own preprocessor instead. The result? Programmers can write cleaner code and let CoffeeScript turn it back into the punctuation-heavy JavaScript Web browsers demand.
Missing semicolons are only the beginning. With CoffeeScript, you can define a function without typing function or wrapping it in curly brackets. In fact, curly brackets are pretty much nonexistent in CoffeeScript. The code is so much more concise that it looks like a modernist building compared to a Gothic cathedral. This is why many of the newest JavaScript frameworks are often written in CoffeeScript and compiled.
Haskell: Functional programming, pure and simple
For more than 20 years, the academics working on functional programming have been actively developing Haskell, a language designed to encapsulate their ideas about the evils of side effects. It is one of the purer expressions of the functional programming ideal, with a careful mechanism for handling I/O channels and other unavoidable side effects. The rest of the code, though, should be perfectly functional.
The community is very active, with more than a dozen variants of Haskell waiting for you to explore. Some are stand-alone, and others are integrated with more mainstream efforts like Java (Jaskell, Frege) or Python (Scotch). Most of the names seem to be references to Scotland, a hotbed of Haskell research, or philosopher/logicians who form the intellectual provenance for many of the ideas expressed in Haskell. If you believe that your data structures will be complex and full of many types, Haskell will help you keep them straight.
Julia: Bringing speed to Python land
The world of scientific programming is filled with Python lovers who enjoy the simple syntax and the freedom to avoid thinking of gnarly details like pointers and bytes. For all its strengths, however, Python is often maddeningly slow, which can be a problem if you’re crunching large data sets as is common in the world of scientific computing. To speed up matters, many scientists turn to writing the most important routines at the core in C, which is much faster. But that saddles them with software written in two languages and is thus much harder to revise, fix, or extend.
Julia is a solution to this complexity. Its creators took the clean syntax adored by Python programmers and tweaked it so that the code can be compiled in the background. That way, you can set up a notebook or an interactive session like with Python, but any code you create will be compiled immediately.
The guts of Julia are fascinating. They provide a powerful type inference engine that can help ensure faster code. If you enjoy metaprogramming, the language is flexible enough to be extended. The most valuable additions, however, may be Julia’s simple mechanisms for distributing parallel algorithms across a cluster. A number of serious libraries already tackle many of the most common numerical algorithms for data analysis.
The best news, though, may be the high speeds. Many basic benchmarks run 30 times faster than Python and often run a bit faster than C code. If you have too much data but enjoy Python’s syntax, Julia is the next language to learn.
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Polina Mikhan Polina.Mikhan@altabel.com Skype ID: poly1020 Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
Social networks and social media APIs from business point of view: following Facebook, Twitter, LI, Pinterest, Google+
Posted on: February 26, 2015
Social networks have become an integral part of our lives and the number of users of social networks has been constantly increasing. We check news and write messages to each other instead of calling directly. Meeting new people, we immediately look for the information about them in the Internet.
Social networks, with all their fame, appeared in our life not so long ago. The first social network in the world appeared in 1995 and it was called Classmates.com. It is functioning nowadays and has more than forty million registered users in Canada and the U.S.A. Randy Conrad, its’ creator, made a breakthrough on the Internet.
Social networks in the business world
For some companies the standard practice is to lead the customers to their business through social networks, while other companies create social networks and this is their business.
In fact, today many use Twitter and Facebook to promote existing and upcoming businesses. People looking to connect with other business-associated contacts usually move to sites like LinkedIn, but one needs to understand that social media is beyond Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Blogs.
Generally, top 5 most popular social networks nowadays are:
- Facebook; 900,000,000 – estimated unique monthly visitors, February 1, 2015.
- Twitter; 310,000,000 – estimated unique monthly visitors, February 1, 2015.
- LinkedIn; 255,000,000 – estimated unique monthly visitors, February 1, 2015.
- Pinterest; 250,000,000 – estimated unique monthly visitors, February 1, 2015.
- Google Plus+; 120,000,000 – estimated unique monthly visitors, February 1, 2015.
Believe it or not, Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only cool social networking sites on the Web. With the daily explosion of startups, there are plenty of new social media tools popping up. These newer platforms could be working on the next big thing, so you’ll want to keep an eye out. The following social networks getting more and more popular nowadays:
- anonymous social networks where users can share their feelings and thoughts without knowing each other. Example of such network may be Secret. This app is available for both Android and iOS;
- addicted to taking selfies? Such app was designed for you too. There is a mobile social network through which you can snap and share selfies named Shots;
- there are some popular social networks that allow you to share photos and videos with others (for example, Snapchat, which is available for both Android and iOS devices);
- mobile text and voice messaging services. In addition to making free calls, you can share videos and photos, create group chats, and find new people nearby. For instance, WeChat. The app is available for Android, iOS and several other devices;
- dating apps. As an example,Tinder is a mobile dating app that pulls your photo and basic info from your Facebook account. Users can swipe “yes” or “no” to potential matches who are nearby. If the feeling is mutual, people can chat within the app;
- social networks for kids. Unfortunately, popular social networks are also filled with adult content, unfiltered comments and potential for cyberbullying, identity theft and child predators.
With this problem in mind, several companies have attempted to create safer alternatives that are essentially “Facebook for kids” – safe social network platforms where kids can be themselves without all the risks. Social networks for kids are built on the balance of entertainment, expression, experience, education and engagement without endangering exposure. Facebook isn’t for kids, but social networking can be. Kid-friendly social networks are monitored and include parental oversight to make sure everyone is safe.
As we may see from Altabel Group’s experience, some of our customers are potentially in a big way to create such social networks for kids. At the moment the most popular social networks for kids are Togetherville, ScuttlePad, Skid-e-Kids, Imbee, Club Penguin and Yoursphere. And who knows, maybe our current or next project will appear in one of the tops.
To your mind, what kind of awesome social network may appear in future? What new is interesting for users nowadays?
Statistics for businesses on social media
– 60% of Small-Medium Businesses (SMB) have gained new customers through social media;
– 46% of users check social media for product information prior to making a purchase;
– 99% of SMBs use Facebook, 98% are on Twitter, but only 59% trust Instagram;
– 90% of Twitter users follow you to get a discount. 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from a specific brand they follow.
So as the statistics shows, businesses can no longer imagine going without social media – whether it’s retail, services or something else. And, although many among them still consider social media as a ‘necessary evil’, the advantages of being present on social media can no longer be ignored.
Social media APIs as effective tool to make business socially-adapted
Actually social media APIs provide businesses with a new way to personalize their marketing campaigns and communicate with customers. By building social media features into your website – whether by simple addition of plug-ins such as “like” or “follow” buttons or more in-depth functionality – you can allow your customers to leave feedback, interact, and communicate socially without having to leave the site or log in elsewhere.
You can also collect and display user-generated content, which can be extremely beneficial as the users themselves can create plenty of free material that might be interesting to a broader audience. In the case of user-generated content in a foreign language, a translation API can be used to facilitate communication. Translation APIs allow content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.) to seamlessly interact with a translation platform to translate uploaded content.
Developers have access to a number of social media application programming interfaces that can help them integrate the services of major social media services into their websites or applications. This is particularly beneficial for content providers, marketers or even e-commerce companies that may have share-worthy content or products.
APIs of top 5 most popular social networks
Facebook Graph API
With well over a billion active monthly users, Facebook is not only the biggest social network worldwide, but also an invaluable mine of data and personal information. Facebook’s Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform and is designed to provide access to every object in Facebook’s database, including users, photos, videos, statuses, conversations, places, and their interlinked relationships with each other.
Developers who log in to the Graph API can use data to create deeper, personalized experience for their own users.
Facebook authentication enables developers’ apps to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, providing a single sign-on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps.
This API makes it easy to connect with users on your website or application and offer them more personalized experience, as well as the ability to like and share pages on your site or app. It can also provide site registration features and a Facebook-based commenting system.
Potential Uses:
– Site registration;
– Personalization;
– Commenting system.
Twitter Embedded Tweets
Twitter’s early policy of providing a relatively simple-to-use API ensured that a host of third-party apps quickly sprang up around the micro-blogging site. The Embedded Tweets tool allows you to take any tweet and embed it directly into the content of your article or website. Moreover, the tweets will display with expanded media (e.g. photos, videos, articles summaries, etc.) and real-time retweet and favorite counts. Plus, when the tweets are embedded, they will become interactive on the Web page, allowing visitors to follow the author, reply, retweet or favorite them without ever leaving the page.
Potential Uses:
– Listen to the conversation around your brand and aggregate the data;
– Create tools that increase the reach of your campaign;
– Display conversation relevant to your campaign.
LinkedIn API
LinkedIn is the world’s largest business social networking hub. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has millions of users and is implemented in over 200 countries. LinkedIn actually provides 2 APIs:
- The JavaScript API is a rich client library enabling you to build dynamic applications in the web browser. Use OAuth 2.0 to easily authorize users via the “Sign In with LinkedIn” button, access LinkedIn data with native objects, and interact with Plugins;
- The REST API provides a simple, consistent representation of people, companies, jobs, and the interactions and relationships between them. Query language lets you read data in XML and JSON at the granularity and aggregation that you choose.
Pinterest API
The Pinterest API provides developers with access to an authenticated user’s pinboards and pins. The API provides detailed user data, as well as the home feed for a user, pins, likes, following, followers and the ability to unfollow. Developers can also access information about specific boards and pins, including creating boards, adding pins, categories and adding/removing likes. The API allows businesses to integrate with Pinterest’s social media platform in an effort engage with customers. With the APIs, developers can access a site’s top repins, most recent pins, related pins, most clicked through pins and pins resulting from specific search terms. The API makes its data available via JSON only, with requests also wrapped as JSON.
Google+ API
Google first started testing its API for the search engine in 2002, enabling up to 1,000 automated searches. It has since released numerous APIs relating to various areas such as Google Maps, Google Wallet, and the Chrome web browser. It might not have the reach of Facebook, but the Google+ API can be used to tap into the platform’s own social graph and to integrate features such as cross-device sign-on into your site or app.
Thought it may not have the name brand recognition of Facebook or Twitter, Google+ is still an incredibly useful social network in some circles. If you’re looking to tap into those clusters of users, you can integrate the Google+ API into your app or website, which allows users to connect with one another for “maximum engagement” and use Google+ features directly from your site or app.
Conclusion
As the API economy continues to grow, more and more companies look to open up their APIs in order to extend their own brand’s reach. The social media landscape is a fast-moving and constantly shifting one, but accessing the features of major platforms via their APIs is likely to continue to be a source of great opportunities, no matter what business you are in.
What do you think, should we expect the rise of new social network giants? Or would top most popular social networking sites stay unchanged? Have you already had the experience of using social networks’ APIs? Do you have any interesting ideas of API using in mind?
You are welcome to share your thoughts and experience with us.
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Marina Karabanova Marina.Karabanova@altabel.com Skype ID: m.karabanova Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
The use of health apps has skyrocketed in 2014. Flurry, a mobile analytics company, has followed over 6,800 health and fitness-related apps, and sees a growth of 62% based on measurements of the number of times the app is opened and used. Overall growth rate apps otherwise is 33%.
By 2017 the app market is predicted to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers is the world’s aging population with its increasing need for medical care. In the United States alone, Tighe notes, almost 20 percent of Americans will be older than 65 by 2030, making them more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and other age-associated conditions. This changing landscape is forcing to create new ways to monitor people health and provide assistance with making health wise choices. And here mobile medical apps have already proved efficient and thus are gaining more and more popularity.
This boom has been also supported by most global IT corporations such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. So here are some recent actions in that area showing that these companies treat this market segment really seriously:
- Google recently launched Google Fit and directed towards more consumers within training and nutrition.
- Apple has partnered with the company Epic. Since Epic handles over 51% of the medical records in the US, it gives Apple a very solid position in healthcare sector. Apple has, in iOS8, also included a personal health platform, HealthKit, which integrates other applications and gathers information for the user will appear in Apple Health app.
- Microsoft invests in a separate solution and will with Microsoft Health Vault offer a platform where people can gather, store, share and use health data online.
- Facebook has integrated MapMyFitness so friends can cheer on each other, share results and compete against each other. This has also contributed to the large increase in the use of health and Fitness app, where distribution is large via the social networking channel.
There is even an opinion that the increased use of health and fitness apps will destroy the market for wearables. It’s hard for them to compete with mobile apps, as the number of smartphone users is really big. So when the software is already integrated into smartphones they automatically become efficient devices for collecting health data. To put it short, the benefits of using mobile apps to wearable medical-devices include 1/ cost savings because there is no need to develop a completely new device, 2/ enhancing existing platforms by adding more sophisticated sensing and data capabilities, 3/ using an interface that consumers know well and is already part of their everyday life.
Healthcare IT outsourcing
Health apps are built up not only by global IT companies, but also by healthcare providers to be used by doctors, specialists and by patients, of course. And here healthcare organizations increasingly take over the idea that IT outsourcing can help them bring their apps faster to the market while they could focus on their core activities.
This tendency has also been stimulated by changing government regulations concerning hospitals and clinics in lots of countries. And while some organizations are broadly outsourcing a mobile applications development, others are handing out the responsibility of IT management and overseeing their entire IT infrastructure.
The global healthcare IT outsourcing market is growing continuously. According to an article by Nearshore Americas, a recent study made by the Everest group states that the global healthcare IT outsourcing market is increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 12%. This gives us an insight on how much demand healthcare institutions now place on IT outsourcing services. According to TechNavio IT outsourcing in the global healthcare and life sciences sector is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 8.6% through 2019.
Among the trends to watch besides going mobile, there is hosting on the cloud by health-related organizations to make their operations safer, using analytics-as-a-service technologies due to growing interest in Big Data, etc. Therefore 70% of healthcare organizations worldwide are expected to invest in consumer-facing mobile applications, wearables, remote health monitoring, and virtual care.
So the world has been ready for a while to embrace healthcare apps and demand for them is not going to slow down any time soon. Among the top medical apps they call CDC Vaccine Schedules, Family Practice Notebook, ASCVD Risk Estimator, etc.
What health-related apps have you tried and which ones do you use daily? Thank you for sharing!
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Aliona Kavalevich Aliona.Kavalevich@altabel.com Skype ID: aliona_kavalevich Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
- In: Apple | Internet Browsers | Node.js | Windows
- 1 Comment
Nowadays there are a lot of browsers that users can choose starting with the old standby Internet Explorer and ending with the newer Chrome and Firefox browsers. If none of those browsers is really your cup of tea, you could try a new one. The “novice” is called Vivaldi and it comes from a team that includes the сo-founder and former CEO of Opera John von Tetzchner.
If you used Opera in the past, you might find that Vivaldi feels rather familiar. The overall look of Vivaldi is a mix of a classic browser UI and the more modern interpretations in browsers like Chrome and Microsoft’s upcoming Spartan.
Vivaldi is filled with awesome features. Here are some of the things you might like when you check out this browser:
- UI
Vivaldi looks good. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that tabs and menus change colour based on the dominant pallete of your active page. This chameleon effect looks fresh, but it can be turned off if it doesn’t suit your tastes.
- Speed Dial
Another great thing that everyone loved about Opera was the Speed Dial feature, and that’s also present in Vivaldi. It allows you to organize websites based on your interests all on one page; e.g. News, Sports, Health, Tech.
- Tab Stack
Open too many websites at once? Couldn’t find what you wanted under all those excessive tabs? Tab stack helps you to group tabs into themed groups allowing you to maximize tabbed resources without needing to scroll left and right.
- Quick Command
Vivaldi features quick commands for easy navigation, allowing users to create custom keyboard shortcuts as well. Whether you’re searching through its various settings, from bookmark panel to download panel, a single keyboard shortcut can do the trick. More geek stuff happens when you go straight to settings then click Navigation to customize the shortcuts.
- Notes
With this function you can easily jot down what’s on your mind while browsing. Notes automatically remember which site you were “looking at” and allow you to add tags for future reference.
Vivaldi has a powerful feature set, but that’s not all. One of the things that makes Vivaldi unique is that it’s built on modern Web technologies. It uses JavaScript and React to create the user interface with the help of Node.js, Browserify and a long list of NPM modules. Vivaldi is the web built with the web.
Right now, the browser is only a technical preview, but there are big plans for Vivaldi in the future. In the coming months, there are plans to add sync, mail support, better performance and extensions. Tatsuki said that Vivaldi will be shaped by the community for the most part, so the feature set will be guided by user demand.
You can download and install Vivaldi on Apple’s Mac, MS Windows and Linux from the web site: https://vivaldi.com/
Can Vivaldi succeed against Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and even Opera? Have you tried the new web browser? Please, share with us your thoughts and experience here below.
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Katerina Kviatkovskaya Kate.Kviatkovskaya@altabel.com Skype ID: kate.kviatkovskaya Business Development Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
If you’re looking for Android automation that isn’t as challenging as Tasker, find bellow the ideal solution :)
Tasker is the de facto standard for Android automation. The only caveat with Tasker is its rather steep learning curve. For anyone wishing to add automation to their Android device, Tasker is the app to use — if you have time to invest in learning the ins and out of the app (the end result is worth it). If you don’t have time to spend diving into that which is Tasker, there are other apps that make automation easier. One such app is MacroDroid. Although it doesn’t have the impressive abilities of Tasker, it can make automation an option for those less than Android adept.
You’ll find only one version of the app on the Google Play Store — the free version. This version is limited to only five macros, with a few actions and constraints per macro. With an in-app purchase, you can gain access to the Pro version and unlimited macros (with unlimited actions and constraints per macro) for $2.99 (USD).
Let’s install MacroDroid and see how you can make it a part of your daily Android life.
Installation
Installing MacroDroid is quite easy. Just follow these simple steps:
- Open the Google Play Store on your Android device
- Search for MacroDroid
- Locate and tap the entry by Arlosoft
- Tap Install
- Read the permissions listing carefully
- If the permissions listing is acceptable, tap Accept
Once the installation is complete, you’ll find the launcher in your app drawer or on your home screen (or both). Tap the launcher, accept the license, and you’re ready to automate.
Usage
The MacroDroid home page (Figure A) is perfectly designed to make it easy for any level of user to get started.
Figure A
MacroDroid running on a Verizon-branded Droid Turbo.
The first thing you might want to take a look at is the templates. From within this listing (Figure B), you can get an idea of what MacroDroid is capable of (you can even edit specific templates).
Figure B
The template section offers plenty of pre-fab automation macros.
Each automation macro is broken down into three categories:
- Trigger — what causes the action to occur
- Action — what the automated task actually does
- Constraint — add an option that must be present before the action can occur
To add a new macro, tap the Add Macro button on the main window. Let’s create a macro that sets the phone to silent when you arrive at work (Note: The details of creating each macro will vary). The first step is to select your trigger (Figure C).
Figure C
Selecting a trigger for your macro.
Search through the list and tap Location Trigger. You’ll then be prompted to select from Area Entered or Area Existed. Select Area Entered and tap OK. Next, you have locate the area on the map. You can tap the radar button at the top to select your current location. Tap the check when finished. (Note: You can’t enter an address, so you must manually find the location on the map.)
Now, select the Action from the list. For our silent mode macro, locate and tap Set Volume. From the pop-up (Figure D), you can adjust the volume for alarms, music, notification, ringer, system sounds, voice calls, and Bluetooth voice. Adjust the volume to fit your needs, and tap OK.
Figure D
Setting the volume to silent for when you enter work.
You can add more actions for the trigger (for this example, we only need the one). Tap the right-pointing arrow to move to constraints. For this particular action, we do not need any constraints (Figure E), so tap the right-pointing arrow at the top right of the window.
Figure E
Adding a constraint to a macro.
The last step is to give your macro a name and tap OK. The macro is now in place and will immediately start working.
That’s really the basic in and out of using MacroDroid. If you want to dig a bit deeper, you can also create variables for your macros. You can create boolean, integer, and string variables that can then be used in the Actions category (for example, to help you count how many SMS messages you receive from a single contact during a day). To create a variable, tap Settings (from within the MacroDroid main window) and then tap Edit MacroDroid Variables. Tap the plus sign [+], give your variable a name, and select the type from the Type drop-down (Figure F).
Figure F
Creating a variable.
Once the variable is created, you can edit it (say you need to change the integer from 0, which is the default, to 1). After the variable is created, you can then use the variable as an action by selecting Set MacroDroid Variable (within the Add Actions screen) and choosing your newly created variable from the list (Figure G).
Figure G
Setting a variable as an action.
Depending on the type of variable, you can define how the variable is to be used (such as Value + 1 for an integer).
Although MacroDroid isn’t as powerful as Tasker, if you want to enjoy automation on your device (and don’t want to have to endure the steeper learning curve of Tasker), this is your app. Give it a try, and see if it doesn’t perfectly fit the bill for your Android automation needs.
Do you automate your Android — or do you prefer everything to be under your specific control? What type of mobile user are you? Let us know in the discussion thread below.
Original here
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Romanas Lauks Romanas.Lauks@altabel.com Skype ID: romanas_lauks Marketing Manager (LI page) Altabel Group – Professional Software Development |
