Distance API for big volume of data - api

I'm looking into getting the driving distance between a current address (entered by a user) and the locations of some shops in the city / town of the user. The list of shops locations could get really big, up to thousands. Do you have any idea what are the best APIs I could use for this, that would support a volume of data this big?
I was thinking about Google MAPs for Business Distance Matrix, but it seems to support 100000 elements per day and I don't think we fit this limit. MapQuest Enterprise Edition, Route Matrix is also an option, but this says that it might have limitations to prevent service degradation.
I was wondering if anyone used any of these and could give me a feedback or if you have other suggestions? I'm open to paid or free products.
Thanks in advance!

Related

How to get a rout information with trafic flow information included for a past date?

I am trying to use Azure Maps API. It will be nice to have route information which should include the locations of course and a speed profile. As you can understand speed profile is not an east one. Free flow speed profile is ok. But we want to simulate real-world conditions meaning that we want to select date and time of departure to get accurate speed information as close to as possible to a real world traffic influence.
Is there any feature that Azure provide this? If not, which API can provide this
I don't have any code at this moment to show since ı don't know which API to use.
Historical traffic data is not currently available in Azure Maps but is being investigated as a potential future feature.

YouTube API Services Compliance Review

I have a project where I need to have the API quota increased significantly from the 10,000 daily hits, and I think this is being processed by Google as part of a YouTube API Services Compliance Review.
However, I have not had any response in over a week and the delay is putting the project at risk of a delayed launch and additional costs.
Does anyone know if this is normal and if there is a way to expedite the review, or speak to someone? Even pay for a higher tier of support?
Thanks in advance.
If you’ve filled the audit form https://support.google.com/youtube/contact/yt_api_form?hl=en properly, you should get a response within two weeks (Google reviews thousands of these, among other things to prevent abuse this is one of the processes that isn’t fully automated).
I recommend if your in a rush since your paying for credits you might as well open a second account and load balance between two or even three accounts; in your code you can create counters and swap before capping out the 24 hour term; not sure what data you’re looking to extract but depends on what data you may be able to even use other services to supplement.
They will get back to you about your application; just requires massive patience.

How to analyse historical waze data?

I'm trying to find a way to get historical speed data for a certain road in the UK to calculate its average speed per time of day AND the maximum speed driven by a any driver on the road between a period time. Any pointers how to do this from Waze? Thanks
I'm afraid Waze doesn't expose that data (understandably, as it is their core business). This excerpt from the help page should say enough:
Please note: Waze does not share any historical data with partners.
If you work for a local government or organisation, you could consider joining the Connected Citizens Program. As a partner you are able to get a data feed for a certain route and you're allowed to store that data to get historical data (as detailed on the Waze Partners Help site).
While I'm not certain about the legal status of doing this without being a partner, you could probably also start building your own historical dataset based on what Waze provides as average speed on a segment by periodically looking up the data returned when you plan a route on the Waze Live Map.
Routing requests are sent to https://www.waze.com/row-RoutingManager/routingRequest?... (see the network console of your browser for more details), but this requires some additional work managing CSRF and session cookies and providing the proper referral header. While not impossible, it's not too easy to pull off.
The response of such a routing request contains the instructions you see on the live map, but also includes things like the length of each specific segment on the route (distance), its average speed without realtime data (crossTimeWithoutRealTime) and its average speed with realtime data (crossTime). It's also possible to request the average speed for a certain time in the day, but this tends to be somewhat unreliable data.
The maximum speed is something you won't be able to find in Waze's data though, I'm afraid. I'm not even certain Waze stores that information as those statistical outliers generally aren't that interesting for navigational instructions. You could try to contact Waze for more information if you're doing a scientific study, but don't get your hopes up too much in that case as they have a small team that is constantly overwhelmed by the amount of questions they receive.

What is a good way to get historical Twitter follower numbers?

I need the historical numbers of followers for a set of 60 Twitter users. Unfortunately the official Twitter API only returns the most current follower count. I know that there is probably no one-size-fit all and fool-proof way to get an accurate follower growth graph for all users in my list. However, would there be a good and logical way to estimate or deduce this based on other information available through Twitter API (e.g. number of retweets, likes)?  I read somewhere that retweet rate grows proportionally with number of followers. 
Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
I think any approximation would be based on some criteria that would most probably not be applicable to all users.
From my point of view, I would start recording the followers from now on in your database and build a graph starting from today and not from the past.
There are services that allow you to buy or access historical data. But only if they have been tracking the account already. For large accounts, it is more likely, but for smaller accounts they probably haven't been tracking them.
https://twittercounter.com/pages/buy-stats/apple
I haven't used these services but I assume they are accurate.

How Do E-Commerce Websites Calculate Postage/Shipping Costs?

I'm just wondering if anyone can provide me with some information into how e-commerce websites automatically calculate the postage and shipping costs for items ordered on-line?
Do these websites use plug-ins/web services to dynamically request this information from the postage/shipping provider? Or do developers manually retrieve the postage costs from the associated shipping provider and then develop their own approximate postage/shipping cost calculation algorithm (in agreement with the e-commerce business of course)? Or are there any alternative approaches used?
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.
EDIT: I have done some basic research on the topic. I've seen some plug-ins for WordPress but each plug-in was limited to specific postage/shipping companies only.
Do these websites use plug-ins/web services to dynamically request
this information from the postage/shipping provider?
Yes, this is certainly an option. In my experience, the APIs provided by UPS and FedEx are decent and work for the UK market.
Or do developers manually retrieve the postage costs from the
associated shipping provider and then develop their own approximate
postage/shipping cost calculation algorithm?
I would not recommend this - a maintenance headache for one reason - and have never seen it done.
Or are there any alternative approaches used?
Sometimes, fixed shipping-costs can be used - for example, when delivery is to a single country or products weights are relatively static. No API call is needed in these scenarios.
Based on my research, I've found that there doesn't seem to be a single standardised way of calculating shipping/postage costs on e-commerce websites. Some companies provide plugins for WordPress, etcetera, to assist in this process, while others companies provide API's.
Primarily, I'm interested in using a UK based shipping/postage provider.
The Royal Mail is the largest postal provider in the UK and it provides an API for a number of tasks; however no official API appears to be available for cost calculation. I did however manage to find an unofficial Royal Mail cost calculation API. It can be found at the following link.