ReadWriteWeb

Over the last year, a firm called Usergrid has been building an open source tool for leading mobile app developers through the process of creating back-end services for managing users. The Usergrid philosophy is contrary to quite a lot of the cloud-centered design methodology promoted by SaaS - the idea that the server can do everything, and a thin device can serve as the portal. Instead, Usergrid has promoted the idea of richer mobile apps that use Web services and APIs in a more passive, RESTful manner.

Late last year on its company blog, Usergrid stated its intent to build out to a cloud-delivered service - essentially, transferring its intelligence to the cloud to help devs build intelligence on client devices. This morning, the firm got its wish, though maybe in a way not everyone expected: Usergrid has been acquired by cloud-based API modeling tool provider Apigee. And as both companies' CEOs tell ReadWriteWeb, the fruit of their new relationship is a little ways down the road.

The most profound announcements made on the first day of the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show was, by far, made by AT&T. The carrier is hosting its annual developers' summit in Las Vegas and made a bevy of announcements today including new HTML5 APIs for developers, six new Android phones and one, enormous, Windows Phone, a partnership with an important cloud operator. Like Verizon, AT&T is making a push to give developers tools to make dynamic new apps intimately tied to the carrier's service and platform.

I work on a small creative team in Human Resources at Humana, and we're lucky to have access to useful tools and the permission to autonomously scope out and prototype small ad-hoc projects. So last year, when our company began to learn about the Socialcast API, it wasn't long before we started to think of ways to use the discussion data to help build and strengthen our internal community.

There were three main things that we focused on as people began to discover and use the platform:

1. How to help people measure and monitor their level of participation,
2. How to reward people for using the social features correctly, and
3. How to help drive adoption and spread the word about the service.

HTML5 development firm appMobi has a gift for developers to kick off the holiday season. The company is making much of its HTML5 device-side APIs available as open source projects starting on November 25, otherwise known as Black Friday. AppMobi is releasing its DirectCanvas, device-APIs for iOS and Android and its MobiUs browser among hundreds of other HTML5 development APIs as open-source projects free for developers to build upon.

Chrome Extension developers that want to add synthesized speech to extensions and Chrome-packaged apps are in luck. Google announced a new Text-to-Speech API for Chrome extensions yesterday, with examples and two sample voices.

According to Google engineer Dominic Mazzoni, a few hacks have enabled text-to-speech already. This involves tricks like sending text to a remote server and returning an MP3 that's played back with HTML5 audio. Smart approach in lieu of an official way to do it, but now Google has an easier (and less bandwidth-intensive) way.

Google has announced that the Google Plus APIs for search, +1s and comments are now available to developers. Search was integrated into Google Plus when it opened to the public, and now developers can build apps that incorporate search.

The Google Plus API first opened on September 15, but the initial release was limited to basic public data. When Plus opened to all users on September 20, the API for hangouts - the video chat feature - was released as well. Now that search and the rest of the conversation features are available, Google Plus apps can get a little more interesting.

Last weekend, Foursquare held its second hackathon, a worldwide, weekend-long affair in which hundreds of developers tinkered away and built new location-based apps and tools on top of Foursquare's API. There were about 100 hacks submitted for consideration and today Foursquare announced the winners.

Taking the top prize is a handy little Web app called Plan My Next Trip, which uses your Foursquare history to recommend things to do when you visit other cities.

The second round of talks between chief executives from Google and Oracle commences today, with the possibility of a settlement between the two over Google's use of Java in Android, as Bloomberg reports this morning. This just days after the latest rebuke of Google by Judge William Alsup, who last Thursday granted only a small part of Google's motion to throw out aspects of Oracle's copyright infringement claims.

Oracle claims, among other things, that when Google copied the precise order and phraseology of Java methods in developing its Dalvik virtual machine for Android, it violated copyright. The judge disagreed. Google claims that such order is necessary in order to educate developers on how APIs work, and since an API is an implementation of software that the Supreme Court ruled falls outside the boundaries of intellectual property, that the API specifications also fall outside those boundaries. The judge disagreed with that too.

Software engineer Mohamed Mansour has released a proof-of-concept app for the Google Plus API called Stream+ that tries to bring some order to the chaotic Google Plus stream. "It uses machine learning algorithms to automatically classify the posts into categories," Mansour says in a public post. Stream+ is among the first releases to take advantage of the parts of the API that Google made available last week.

The app itself is not very useful yet, but it's a start. "Some categories are not meaningful," Mansour says, "and I am trying to optimize it further which is quite difficult." But Mansour's insights after developing for the API are instructive. On the Stream+ website, he says that the API was "very easy" to learn and use, but that it suffers from "extreme slowness" in practice.

Amidst all the Facebook news, have you noticed how quiet the Google Plus team has been this week? Too quiet, eh? Here's why: they've just released the first documents for the Google Plus API. Today on the new Google Plus Platform Blog, the Plus team has opened parts of the API to developers, and this is "just the beginning."

The time has come for outside applications built on the Google Plus platform. With this release, Google has laid out its policies for independent developers, which it summarizes with three simple principles: "put the user first, be transparent, and respect user data." And with that, off to the races.