Alexa Opened up to Developers

Amazon.com is throwing open its Alexa search engine to web and software developers, to create customized searches and vertical search engines,thereby offering them the ability to specify web crawls for around 5 billion documents in Alexa's index.

Alexa is best known for the web traffic statistics it provides forsites, and was acquired by Amazon in 1999.

The "Alexa Web Search Platform" offers 3 online web snapshots of up to100 terabytes each, plus tools for sifting through content so developers can create their own data sets. Developers can upload, compile, and run their own programs on a processing cluster; store their output on astorage cluster; integrate their data into a search index; and access their search through Amazon's Web services.

Reportedly Rainer Typke, a Netherlands-based web developer, has already used the service to help people search for music by whistling a melody on his web site - musipedia.org.

Asterisk - Open source PBX

Asterisk-based telephony solutions offer a rich and flexible featureset. Asterisk offers both classical PBX functionality and advancedfeatures, and interoperates with traditional standards-based telephonysystems and Voice over IP systems. Asterisk offers the features onewould expect of a large proprietary PBX system such as Voicemail,Conference Bridging, Call Queuing, and Call Detail Records.

http://www.asterisk.org/features

Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3Cstandard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XMLediting, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development process, and by making sure Inkcape is easy to learn, to use, and to extend.

http://www.inkscape.org/

MATLAB - The Language of Technical Computing

MATLAB is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran.

You can use MATLAB in a wide range of applications, including signal and image processing, communications, control design, test and measurement, financial modeling and analysis, and computational biology. Add-on toolboxes (collections of special-purpose MATLAB functions, available separately) extend the MATLAB environment to solve particular classes of
problems in these application areas.

MATLAB provides a number of features for documenting and sharing your work. You can integrate your MATLAB code with other languages and applications, and distribute your MATLAB algorithms and applications.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/

Google's Powerful APIs for developers

We all probably know or have even used Google Search APIs, but over theperiod of time Google has consistently improved its tally of APIs itoffer to developers to use and customise various google products and services.

Here is list as of Nov-2005

1. AdWords
2. Blogger
3. Deskbar
4. Desktop Search
5. Earth
6. Froogle
7. Gmail
8. Groups
9. Maps
10.News
11.Search Appliance
12.Talk
13.Video
14.Web search

You can check all of them out at:http://code.google.com/apis.html

And if you hurry and use some of them, you can even win a Google T-Shirtand promotion on their developer page.