Ms. Mason

We've expected some big (data) developements from Bitly since the New York startup announced a $15 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures July. Today, chief data scientist Hilary Mason is finally ready to show you what they're working with, empirically speaking.

The company announced the launch of three new data APIs that will radically boost the utility of the service for consumers and business clients. And it's not even your birthday, data nerds!

There's a real-time search API, open to any Bitly user. The company is also opening up an API for content analysis and a "bursting phrases" or "attention spikes" API that functions sort of like Twitter's "trending topics." Obviously APIs are geared toward third-party developers to incorporate into their products and build complimentary applications. However, any Bitly user can play around with some of that new-and-vastly-improved functionality using a demo interface at rt.ly.com. "We're data hackers, not UI designers," Ms. Mason warned us, but the site is very user-friendly.

Go to rt.ly and you'll find a number of filters that let you search all Bitly links by city, social network it was shared on, key words, languages, and even topics. You can also "create a story" for a particular search, like our favorite subject "Eric Schmidt," [see below]. That pops up a report with a map showing click rate, the geographical distribution of readers, link referrers, related stories, top domains, and more. "People who are really social web savvy have been using this already to discover the kind of content they might want to share or if they are writing content to see how it’s being distributed," she told Betabeat by phone.

It's obvious after spending some time on rt.ly that Bitly thinks about search differently than your standard Google query. "Our search lets you do things like describe the criteria you’re interested in and then just see what’s popular in that subset right now. An example--and one that I like to show off--is links about the topic food being clicked statistically disproportionately from Brooklyn. So you get a lot of the artisanal pickle style stuff and restaurant reviews."

Bitly's search function is also distinguished by its emphasis on real-time. "There’s the stream and we just sort of let you filter it and watch content pop in as it becomes popular and drop out as people stop paying attention to it," she said.

The interface also lets users peek at the content Bitly analyzes on the other side at the other side of its shortened link. "We do things like pull out the key phrases in that content and pull out the topics," she said.

The "bursting phrases" API is a even more complex. "Basically we calculate the click rate across all of Bitly's data on every web page containing any significant phrase in every language that we track," she said. "What that lets us do is look for the phrases that are getting a disproportionate amount of attention right now." It's sort of like Twitter's trending topics, she explained, in that, "we can tell you what people are paying attention to that we did not expect based on historical behavior."

Some of the data revealed by the new social APIs will start to show up on Bitly.com, she said. "You can expect to see much better stats for consumers that will draw off of this data, as well as better discovery tools on the enterprise side and audience analysis tools."

Ms. Mason didn't seem anxious about Twitter's sudden zeal for cracking down on third-party apps. "We’re always concerned about it but because of the way Bitly works--you wrap the link in a Bitly link before you share it on Twitter--we haven’t had to deal with any of those issues," she said. Even after Twitter started shortening links, 30 percent of all links shared on the service are still powered by Bitly. The company powers around 30,000 different domains for people. "The examples we usually give are the New York Times, the Dalai Lama, and Mariah Carey on the celebrity side," she added. "So it’s not all bit.ly links by a lot."

Besides, she noted, Bitly isn't all about Twitter. "We see almost the same amount of data for Facebook as well." Any links shared privately, however, won't be exposed by the API.

Developers chomping at the bit to work with Bitly's API will have a chance at a hackathon at its office next week, although the exact dates and times haven't been around.

If all this data is too much for you to handle, you can always take the old school approach, as Ms. Mason reminded us. Add a plus sign to any Bitly link and it takes you to a stats page for just that article.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

So we survived! The Mayan-predicted end-of-the-world-armaggedon-pocalypse was a no-show. Now it's time to party! Of course, I still have a dozen cans of anti-zombie spray lying around... interested? :)

In the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Mayor Bloomberg and 750 other mayors have come together to create Demand A Plan to fight for gun safety. A ton of leaders from the tech industry, both here in New York and in Silicon Valley, have joined the cause including Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Marc Benioff (SalesForce), Evan Williams (Twitter), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Laurene Jobs, Randi Zuckerberg and many others. And a large-scale social media effort is underway, similar to how the industry came together during SOPA/PIPA.

New York City recently announced the H.E.L.M. (Hire Expand in Lower Manhattan) contest to bring more startups into Manhattan’s growing tech scene. It promises up to $1.2M (five cash grants of up to $250,000 each) to startups looking to reside in Lower Manhattan. The application deadline has been extended to noon of December 31.

Heard of Socratic Labs? They're an ed-tech accelerator based here in New York City, creating a community for education innovators. Deadline for applying for the first batch is December 31.

Here's some stuff I've been watching recently ..... Well-respected VC Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital talking about the venture capital business. GRP Partners' Mark Suster elaborating on where content, media and monetization are headed. Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson's insightful talk and Q&A at the Enterprise Tech meetup, where he talked about network effects, ankle biters and "shorting the entire big, fat, old, cynical, rip-off artist enterprise software business." Jason Calacanis interviewing XPrize and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, who talked about tackling big issues through entrepreneurship including literacy, alzheimers, earthquake detection and curing cancer.

Random nugget: "I'll nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so." - Jerry Seinfeld in a recent feature in the NY Times.

And now let's see what's going down in the Alley this week...

Demo and Get Feedback
Designed to help founders get feedback on their ideas.
Tuesday (Dec. 25), 6:30 p.m. @ WeWork Labs, 175 Varick Street

Review BiohackersNYC 2012 & discuss 2013
Wednesday (Dec. 26), 6 p.m. @ Hu Kitchen, 78 5th Avenue

ConnectNYC Fiber Challenge: Application Deadline
Small and medium-sized businesses across the five boroughs can apply for high-speed broadband at their location. Winners will receive free fiber build-out to their place of business, an overall value of up to $7 million for all winning businesses.
Thursday (Dec. 27), 9 a.m. @ To be decided

Growth Hacking Workshop: Lean Marketing for Startups
With Mattan Griffel (founder and CEO at The Front Labs, Partner at Grow/Hack).
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ General Assembly East, 902 Broadway, 4th Fl.

The What and Why of APIs
Learn all about APIs from one of the industry's leading specialists, Matt LeMay (Platform Manager, bitly).
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ General Assembly East, 902 Broadway, 4th Fl.

Home for the Holidays Brooklyn!
Bringing together Etsy employees with local sellers, buyers, and friends of the handmade artisan community. A festive gathering with drinks & food.
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6 p.m. @ Etsy Labs, 55 Washington Street, #712

Reinvent the Payphone Meeting #2
Thursday (Dec. 27), 6:30 p.m. @ The Lab, 122 West 26th Street, 5th Fl.

DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup
Friday (Dec. 28), 8:30 a.m. @ DUMBO Kitchen, 108 Jay Street, Brooklyn

More events on the horizon...
The Product Group January 2013 on Jan. 3 @ MTV Networks / Viacom
Foursquare Hackathon 2012: Connect all the Apps! on Jan. 5 @ Foursquare HQ
A Conversation with Adaptly Founder Nikhil Sethi on Jan. 7 @ General Assembly East
#BARK Presents: New Year New You | What Can We Learn From Brands That Pivot on Jan. 8 @ Yotel
Invasion of The Hackathons: Creating Unique Opportunities for Entrepreneurs on Jan. 8 @ NYU Poly
January 2013 NY Tech Meetup on Jan. 8 @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts
NJ Tech Meetup 32 on Jan. 10 @ Stevens Institute Of Technology
Startup GC Panel #2 on Jan. 10 @ General Assembly
Enterprise Technology Meetup on Jan. 15 @ Cooley

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! And Happy Holidays! :)

(Photo: Amazon)

When you think of Amazon, what comes to mind? Ebooks, next-day delivery and the Kindle probably float to the top, but what about maps? Not so much. But it turns out the online retailer wants to also nudge its way into the map game.

Today Amazon announced the release of the Amazon Maps API in beta, which allows select developers to integrate Amazon's mapping technology into their own apps on the Kindle Fire.

Amazon is hoping its new API will lure devs away from Google Maps by providing a "simple migration path" to switch from the native Google Maps API on Android. According to the post, Amazon's API will feature:

• Interactive Maps. You can embed a Map View in your app for customers to pan, zoom and fling around the world. You have the option to display a user’s current location, switch between standard maps and satellite view, and more.

• Custom Overlays. You can display the locations of businesses, landmarks and other points of interest with your own customized markers and pins.

Amazon's play for its own maps API seems to date back to at least a few months ago, when it acquired 3D mapping startup UpNext. Google Maps has never been built into the Kindle Fire--in order to access it, users have to open it in the browser or download a third-party Android app. By building its own API, Amazon can effectively skip Google altogether.

A few weeks ago, a rumors of a cooperation with Nokia also swirled, further pumping up the notion of Amazon's potential move into maps. "Cooperating with Nokia may help Amazon develop integrated, or 'native,' mapping functionality for the Kindle Fire without relying on Google Maps," the Chicago Tribune wrote.

From today's announcement, it's unclear if Nokia was involved in the release of the Maps API, but it seems like Amazon has finally gotten its own native map app. Sorry, GOOG.

Moot (Photo: Austin 360)

4chan is a little stuck in web 1.0. Like Craigslist and even Ebay, its interface has been paused in the mid-aughts, making navigation a little less than intuitive. But that could change very soon. After returning to the fold to introduce a Q&A feature last month, 4chan ombudsman moot (nee Chris Poole) announced on the site's blog today that he is releasing a read-only JSON API.

Mr. Poole said that 1.5 percent of 4chan's traffic comes from extensions and third party apps, but those apps work primarily by parsing HTML. By releasing a JSON API, developers can begin to build third party clients--both mobile and desktop--that provide a more optimal 4chan reading experience and ostensibly run much faster than their HTML brethren. (Read-only means that developers can harness the API to allow users to read content from 4chan, but not allow them to post through third party apps.)

According to the post:

 "4chan" and "API" are certainly two words I never thought I'd find in the same sentence, but alas, here we are....The decision to release an API was partially out of necessity, but also because I'm curious to see how people will use it....This potentially has huge performance implications, and it's much more efficent to fetch JSON objects rather than scrape a full HTML page.

4chan has released "a crude documentation" of the new API on Github. Who's excited for prettied-up iPad mags full of noodz?

The announcement also included information about some new 4chan features. "Almost every feature from our offical extension and other popular third-party extensions has been implemented natively into the site, and a handful have been enabled by default," wrote Mr. Poole.

That means devs looking to harness 4chan's new JSON API better have some fancy tricks up their sleeves, since this inline extension will render a lot of the functionality of those apps, well, moot. (Zing!)

(Photo: Twitter Blog)

After making the rounds on its whirlwind tour of alienating everyone--by revoking API rights from products and developers left and right--Twitter would now like to tell you who is cool enough to meet its exacting standards. Today, the company launched "Twitter Certified Products," tools and platforms for the microblogging service that it has deigned to approve of. Think Dick Costolo gave the CEOs of these companies BFF bracelets?

According to the Twitter blog:

Today we are launching the Twitter Certified Products Program to bring some of the most innovative products and services from Twitter developers to businesses and organizations that need them most....The program is launching with three verticals based on needs we see from partners every day:

• Engagement Products, which help brands keep in touch with their customers
• Analytics Products, which help businesses learn from their customers on Twitter
• Data Reseller Products, which serve as platforms for innovation on top of large numbers of Tweets

Official Twitter partners include Hootsuite, Radian6 and Topsy.  Tweetdeck--which seems to be the most popular among the tech people we know--wasn't included in the bunch. Though as one Twitter user pointed out to us, Twitter owns Tweetdeck, which kind of gives them a permanent seat at the cool cafeteria table.

(Photo: Maximum PC)

Twitter announced stricter API restrictions yesterday, confirming that it wants a "consistent Twitter experience." Bad news for anyone who uses a 3rd party Twitter client! [BuzzFeed]

Oof...Facebook stock fell below $20 yesterday, following the end of a lockout. [Wall Street Journal]

NYC is second to San Francisco in terms of tech job growth. Aww, silver's nothing to be ashamed of. There, there. [Crain's]

WikiLeaks denies that the UK government has the authority to storm the Ecuadorian embassy and take Julian Assange. Oh, this is gonna be GOOD. [WikiLeaks]

Nintendo is socially evil, basically. [CNN]

Annnd WHAT, mothafuckas? (Photo: About.me)

Let the games begin, my friends. Due to API restrictions, Twitter is no longer allowing Instagram app users to use the “Find Your Friends” feature to connect with their friends on Twitter. But Instagram doesn’t seem too bogged down by the news--possibly because it's busy celebrating reaching 80 million users today.

The “Find Your Friends” feature is still available on other apps, including The Fancy and Foursquare. However, The Fancy only boast around one million users and Foursquare around 10 million, a fraction of the milestone Instagram reached today.

Given Instagram’s ever-expanding user base, Twitter may be unable to withstand the data pull from the “Find Your Friends” feature. Or, as TechCrunch speculates, it could be a conniving attack on Facebook’s latest pet. With Zuck set to acquire Instagram for $1 billion, Twitter may be pulling a few tricks against its competitors. (Dick Costolo's probably cackling in his office right now.)

But this whole mafia-esque scenario does get a little incestuous – Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey (now CEO of Square) is also an investor in Instagram. Would he really be willing to kill his baby in the battle for social media dominance? Maybe so, if they can't keep his site running without any bugs.

Meanwhile, Instagram seems content to toast over reaching its 80 million users and four billion photos shared benchmark, just three months after releasing its Android application. And Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat that they have “some pretty fun things in the pipeline.”

Betabeat has reached out to Twitter and Instagram and will update you when we hear more about this thrilling social networking drama.

Aviary's editor inside of Bigstock

What would it cost for a company to throw a photo editor into their mobile app? According to some of the partners working with Aviary, matching the effects they get from using their API would require quite the investment.

“I’d say it’s safe to estimate, to cover the range of options built into Aviary, it would take a good 4 to 6 months of dev time and then likely a single full time person just expanding the filter set, bug fixing and adding new stuff ongoing," said Josh Lehman, Product Manager at OneLouder Apps, the creator of Friendcaster for Facebook.

That adds up to several hundred thousand dollars in costs. So it's no surprise that Aviary, which produces a suite of simple, powerful photo editing tools for websites and mobile apps, has found a wealth of partners for its API and mobile SDK, now being used by over 300 partners after being released three months ago.

“Aviary allows us to incorporate editing features that we otherwise couldn’t. Not just because of the cost of developing it ourselves, but because replicating the quality of the product would be difficult," said Boris Masis, product lead at Bigstock.

Photos are Facebook's killer app, and the companies that have been using Aviary to add photo editing to their services have found increased engagement, on average 90 seconds in the editor itself. "Ever since Halftone was released, users have asked for the ability to crop, rotate, and edit image properties like brightness, saturation, and contrast. While those features were on our list, they always took a back seat to other enhancements," said Mike Swanson, owner of Juicy Bits, the creator of Halftone. "So, we were thrilled to learn about the Aviary iOS SDK. And it took less than 15 minutes to download the SDK and integrate it with Halftone."

The long term plan isn't public yet, but from what we understand (thanks super top secret sources!), the goal for Aviary is to start offering premium services on top of the basic photo editor. If the company can help these third party services to better monetize their users, then they can collect part of that additional revenue stream. Keep making partners happy, the thinking goes, and everyone will win down the road, as mobile and photo sharing continue to boom.

TARGET ACQUIRED.

In the Venn diagram between techies and Terminator 2 fans, we're guessing the overlap is oh, let's say 100.00 percent. But a new iPhone app built by Silicon Alley's Rich Cameron and Haris Amin might be the first time the two have officially merged.

Cyborg Vision, which made its App Store debut for the iPhone and iPad 2 this morning, uses the Face.com API and Facebook to let see the world around you like a cyborg assassin sent from the future. Its best trick is actually recognizing your Facebook friends and returning a red-screen in real time with their Facebook data that would make Skynet proud. Mr. Cameron and Mr. Amin, who both work at the health and fitness app DailyBurn, first developed the concept at the video hack day, where the app took first prize. They then spent weekends getting it Apple-ready.

On the phone with Betabeat last week, Mr. Amin explained how it works: When a user opens Cyborg Vision, the app requests permission to sign in with Facebook, after which it downloads info about your friends into its database. Through the phone's camera function, you scan a friend's picture or, if they're sitting across from you, the actual friend. A request is sent to Facebook to "so it trains against your friends." The image is then run through Face.com's API, and info from the database is pushed out in real time onto your screen.

Mr. Cameron came up with the idea after the two collaborate on a slide-synching app at TechCrunch Disrupt. "I just wanted to do something that was more fun than presentation sharing—something a little less enterprise-y! We were just kind of throwing out ideas, and I threw out the idea that what if we made Terminator-vision, like it can look at somebody and recognize them and it will look like the movie and everything," Mr. Cameron said on the phone. "We love the movies. I obviously didn’t care for the third one, I don’t think anyone does. [Ed. Agreed!] That was the event of my childhood, I feel like. It was the biggest movie of any summer."

The two developers embedded some surprises in the app. "We hid some Easter eggs in the app, which I think you’re the only person who knows about besides me and Haris," said Mr. Cameron. "It recognizes Arnold Schwarzenegger, even if you’re not signed into Facebook. It will recognize certain people, maybe tied to the movies, or technology. It recognizes Steve Jobs."

Neither developer plans on quitting their day jobs, though they figure $0.99 is a fair price to pay for impressing your friends. "We’re viewing it as a parlor trick or this is a fun thing you can pull out on your friends at the bar. At the same time, it feels like the first time where facial recognition has been handed off to the consumer world where—for a dollar—you can get this on your phone and it will actually do facial recognition and identity people. It’s kind of neat," said Mr. Cameron, whose app already has a couple 5-star reviews.

"If we make millions, that’s another story."

Cyborg Vision from Rich Cameron on Vimeo.

This is a guest post from Steven Romalewski who blogs at Spaciality. Mr. Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).  A theme throughout his work over the past 20 years has been public access to data - identifying, obtaining, analyzing, and providing widespread access to data sets that help people understand their local environments. He has previously blogged about New York City's OpenData initiative here.

@nycgov posted a tweet on Friday touting the map of WiFi hotspots on the new NYC OpenData site.  I was impressed the city was trying to get the word out about some of the interesting data sets they’ve made public. It was retweeted, blogged about, etc many many times over during the day.

The map is nice (with little wifi symbols  marking the location of each hotspot).  And it certainly seems to show that there are lots of hotspots throughout the city, especially in Manhattan.

But when I took a close look, I was less than impressed.  Here’s why:

• No metadata. The NYC Socrata site has zero information on who created the data, why it was created, when it was created, source(s) for the wifi hotspots, etc.  So if I wanted to use this data in an app, or for analysis, or just to repost on my own website, I’d have no way of confirming the validity of the data or whether it met my needs.  Not very good for a site that’s supposed to be promoting transparency in government.
• No contact info. The wifi data profile says that “Cam Caldwell” created the data on Oct. 7, 2011 and uploaded it Oct 10.  But who is Cam?  Does this person work for a city agency?  It says the data was provided by DoITT, but does Cam work at DoITT?
  • If I click the “Contact Data Owner” link I just get a generic message form.  I used the “Contact Data Owner” link for a different data set last week, and still haven’t heard back.  Not even confirmation that my message was received, let alone who received it.  Doesn’t really inspire confidence that I can reach out to someone who knows about the data in order to ask questions about the wifi locations.
• No links for more information. The “About” page provides a couple of links that seem like they might describe the data, but they don’t.
  • For example, this link tells me about the web map service that I can use to display the map on my own site, but doesn’t provide any meaningful information about the actual data themselves.

If I were to use the wifi data for a media story, or to analyze whether my Community Board has more or less hotspots than other Boards, or if I wanted to know if the number of hotspots in my area has changed over time, the NYC Socrata site isn’t helpful.

Even looking at the map on its own, it’s not very helpful.  Without knowing if the list of hotspots is comprehensive (does it include the latest hotspots in NYC parks? does it include the new hotspots at MTA subway stations? etc) or up to date (the Socrata site says the list of wifi sites is “updated as needed” – what does that mean?), I have zero confidence in using the data beyond just a pretty picture.

I’m sure if I clicked the “Contact Data Owner” link, eventually I’d get answers to these questions. But that’s not the point.  The point is that the new NYC OpenData site bills itself as a platform to facilitate how “public information can be used in meaningful ways.”  But if the wifi data is any guide, the OpenData site makes it almost impossible to meaningfully do anything with the data.

The wifi data is another example of how I think NYC’s implementation of the new Socrata platform is a step backwards.  Other NYC websites that provide access to public data — the City Planning Department’s Bytes of the Big Apple site as well as agency-specific sites from Finance, Buildings, HPD, and others — all provide detailed metadata, data “dictionaries”, and other descriptive information about available data files.  This contextual and descriptive information actually makes these data sets useful and meaningful, inviting the public to become informed consumers and repurposers of the city’s data.

The Socrata platform, in and of itself, seems great.  But NYC hasn’t done a very good job at all of putting it to use.  #opendata #fail