The guys at uberVU have been uber busy launching their API, ContextVoice. Besides drawing some attention to their launch, we think it’s important for other startups to take note of the approach as well. The team noticed that much of the attention and interest was in other companies wanting to use their API and so they listened to their users and created a dedicated service that addresses customers’ needs much more directly and they did this with great efficiency. Instead of clinging to a way of doing things they liked, they’ve adopted an approach that delivers to users what they most want. Good luck uberVU!
ContextVoice is an API that tracks comments from social sites around a URL close to real-time. If a certain story, picture or video gets shared on social sites, we get the mentions and comments from those social sites around that specific story, picture or video. For people familiar with uberVU, it allows you to do everything uberVU does, just as an API, so you can use the data inside your own app. (More about the service here)
But why should you care? As conversations make up a larger part of the Web, a lot of Web services want to tap into people’s conversations. Disqus is using ContextVoice to give their users social comments around blog posts. GReactions is using ContextVoice to get social comments around stories in Google Reader. Some other companies want to use ContextVoice to build analytics on top of the data, mash conversational data with financial data and sell that to their customers.
The use cases are many, but the infrastructure to do that yourselves is very complex, costly and time consuming to develop. That’s why we have a free offering of 5000 API calls/day that startups can use to prototype applications without the hassle of building web crawlers and conversational engines on their own.
For more help on figuring out what you can do with ContextVoice and how to go about implementing your ideas drop them a line at hello@contextvoice.com.
For more on the launch announcement click here.
