Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
I run a website where users can upload art images and photographs. Now, I am looking for a photo printing API to sell printed products to visitors. I want to do this entirely from my own app, under my own domain. Basically, I need something similar to Google Cloud Print, but I really need high quality print products, like large canvases and aluminium prints. This print service would preferably be globally available and at least take care of the actual printing, international shipping and - if I would be really lucky - also customer service.
So far, I have not been very successful, because most print facilities do not have a very user-friendly API and/or require a minimum number of orders that is completely ridiculous. Suggestions are welcome!
Take a look at https://www.kite.ly for mobile print SDK's and RESTful print API offerings.
Full disclosure: I'm cofounder of the company so a little biased, but our products and offerings also happen to be really really good (especially from a developer integration point of view) so I'll take any chance to shout about it ;)
We're all about high quality, beautiful personalised products and we're adding new ones all the time: Photo Prints, Magnets, Postcards, Posters, Stickers, Phone cases, etc, etc...
REST Print API: https://www.kite.ly/docs/1.1/
iOS Print SDK: https://github.com/OceanLabs/iOS-Print-SDK
Android Print SDK: https://github.com/OceanLabs/Android-Print-SDK
Several of our partners also have millions of users hitting our services so you'll be in good company!
Here's a peek at our iOS Print SDK (Android is similar, and REST API is naturally without UI and for more advanced use cases):
Try Peecho. The Peecho Simple Print API allows developers to build professional printing functionality entirely in their own apps, with a very simple REST API to place print orders through Peecho's cloud print network. It is prepaid, so you can build all screens yourself, including checkout and payment (so you can decide on your own pricing and profit). There is no minimum order volume - you can start with 1 piece.
If your website has photos in a gallery, it may be faster to just implement the javascript-based Simple Print Button. The Simple Print Button allows digital publishers to sell their content in print, by adding a single line of code to their website. It includes checkout and payment, so there will be less effort for you.
For both services, Peecho offers a dashboard for order management and tracking, worldwide production in print facilities like CEWE COLOR and RPI Print, international shipping and delivery and even customer service. Products range from hardcover books to premium quality wall decoration like aluminium prints, as offered by for example Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
Take a look at the Printchomp Print API http://printchomp.com/api . The now have over 10,000 printers across North America including photo printing on demand. The Printchomp Print API is truly restful and has adopted Hypertext Application Language (HAL) to make consumable and explorable. All API calls and responses are very consistent making it easy to program with.
There is also http://print.milkbooks.com/ They are a single image print API that is plugs easily into any platform. Margins are high as is price point but that is offset by the super high quality of the product. You have control of the RRP so you can reduce price at any time. Once the user has ordered a book you no longer have any involvement in the process as they handle everything, from payment to a full refund even if damaged during transit.
With an extensive product range from single art prints to notecards, canvases to gallery frames and photo books including a range of Moleskine options the variety is surprisingly varied considering they are reputed to be a specialist artistic book publisher.
The API is simple to integrate, requires no investment on your part, is multi platform, handles all aspects of the order process. The API is scalable as it is handled by Amazon Web Services so grows with your company. It's customizable as you can develop your own range of products however this does require some investment on your part and because they have adopted a https always on policy, security is pretty tight too.
There is also http://www.theprintersinc.co.uk/ They have a RESTful API as well, no sign-up fees, worldwide delivery and no minimum orders. In fact your app can still make orders even if your account balance has got to zero. Your orders would be placed on hold until you top up your account. They print on 12 Giclee fine art printers and can print from A5 prints to a whopping 60" x 40" canvas... They also have free UK delivery as well.
Related
The question is about using a chat-bot framework in a research study, where one would like to measure the improvement of a rule-based decision process over time.
For example, we would like to understand how to improve the process of medical condition identification (and treatment) using the minimal set of guided questions and patient interaction.
Medical condition can be formulated into a work-flow rules by doctors; possible technical approach for such study would be developing an app or web site that can be accessed by patients, where they can ask free text questions that a predefined rule-based chat-bot will address. During the study there will be a doctor monitoring the collected data and improving the rules and the possible responses (and also provide new responses when the workflow has reached a dead-end), we do plan to collect the conversations and apply machine learning to generate improved work-flow tree (and questions) over time, however the plan is to do any data analysis and processing offline, there is no intention of building a full product.
This is a low budget academy study, and the PHD student has good development skills and data science knowledge (python) and will be accompanied by a fellow student that will work on the engineering side. One of the conversational-AI options recommended for data scientists was RASA.
I invested the last few days reading and playing with several chat-bots solutions: RASA, Botpress, also looked at Dialogflow and read tons of comparison material which makes it more challenging.
From the sources on the internet it seems that RASA might be a better fit for data science projects, however it would be great to get a sense of the real learning curve and how fast one can expect to have a working bot, and the especially one that has to continuously update the rules.
Few things to clarify, We do have data to generate the questions and in touch with doctors to improve the quality, it seems that we need a way to introduce participants with multiple choices and provide answers (not just free text), being in the research side there is also no need to align with any specific big provider (i.e. Google, Amazon or Microsoft) unless it has a benefit, the important consideration are time, money and felxability, we would like to have a working approach in few weeks (and continuously improve it) the whole experiment will run for no more than 3-4 months. We do need to be able to extract all the data. We are not sure about which channel is best for such study WhatsApp? Website? Other? and what are the involved complexities?
Any thoughts about the challenges and considerations about dealing with chat-bots would be valuable.
I am making a little personal project.
Ideally I would like to be able to make programmatically a google search and have the count of results. (My goal is to compare the results count between a lot (100000+) of different phrases).
Is there a free way to make a web search and compare the popularity of different texts, by using Google Bing or whatever (the source is not really important).
I tried Google but seems that freely I can do only 10 requests per day.
Bing is more permissive (5000 free requests per month).
Is there other tools or way to have a count of number of results for a particular sentence freely ?
Thanks in advance.
There are several things you're going to need if you're seeking to create a simple search engine.
First of all you should read and understand where the field of information retrieval started with G. Salton's paper or at least read the wiki page on the vector space model. It will require you learning at least some undergraduate linear algebra. I suggest Gilbert Strang's MIT video lectures for this.
You can then move to the Brin/Page Pagerank paper which outlays the original concept behind the hyperlink matrix and quickly calculating eigenvectors for ranking or read the wiki page.
You may also be interested in looking at the code for Apache Lucene
To get into contemporary search algorithm techniques you need calculus and regression analysis to learn machine learning and deep learning as the current google search has moved away from Pagerank and utilizes these. This is partially due to how link farming enabled people to artificially engineer search results and the huge amount of meta data that modern browsers and web servers allow to be collected.
EDIT:
For the webcrawler only portion I'd recommend WebSPHINX. I used this in my senior research in college in conjunction with Lucene.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
In which way to Google and Alexa determine the rank of a site?
I have an account on Alexa, but it doesn't show any information because my site visitors are few (500-600 per day).
Google PageRank is always 0.
I followed all standards of responsive design (for mobile and desktop), good keywords, w3c validations, cool articles, and backlinks. Why does my website have the same rank as a plain white page would?
Alexa Rank is based on visitors and backlinks and it's not consider On-Page SEO.
Google Rank is calculated on both Off-Page and On-Page SEO (responsive design, page titles, descriptions, content and validations are relevant).
However, google rank is very slow to increase (in my experience); if your site is online from less than 1 year, don't worry.
Google Page rank and Alexa Ranking are completely different. Google page rank is the grade given for the quality of a site whereas Alexa ranking depends on the popularity of the website, the visitors to the website and so on.
SEO is as such a slow process but it is an effective one. Just continue doing your regular seo work without spamming and you would get a good rank in a long run. If you are an expert in SEO and are confident about what you are doing, go ahead. Else, I would suggest you to choose a professional SEO company like Integra Web Services, who may assist you to achieve good rankings.
Google's PageRank as displayed by the Google Toolbar is a measure of the quality of your back links to a particular page. Google doesn't update the data displayed by the toolbar very often. The last time they updated the date was in December 2013. If your page was created since then, it won't show any PageRank until the next data refresh from Google.
Google does internally calculate PageRank for their rankings every day. So it is very possible for a page to show up in the search results while still showing PR 0.
Alexa calculates its rank to the site as a whole based on the number of users that site has. Alexa gets its data about the number of users on a site primarily from people with the Alexa Toolbar installed. There is very little advantage to having a better Alexa ranking other than bragging rights, so I would recommend not paying much attention to it.
The alexa rank depends on high quality back links and your relationship
The key to getting more search traffic is not just about building more links or adding more content. It is also about understanding Google’s algorithm. So, if you want to maximize your search rankings, your best job is to do what is best for your users. Sure, in the short run your rankings may not climb as fast as you would like them to, but in the long run you will rank well
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a question similar to this one, only that my question is focused on "non-Western" users (with this I refer to users outside of Western Europe and the US).
I have to pay users of my website (for services rendered for instance), and they are located at places where banking systems are poor to say the least. They do have ATMs, and credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, etc) work in most of these countries.
After many hours of browsing the web looking into this, I figure my best bet is to go with Prepaid Debit Cards. They allow me to deposit onto the cards, and my users to simply withdraw or pay for things using that card. In fact, several of those services were mentioned in the post I linked before. These were mentioned:
Payoneer: on paper their service looks good, but I have not yet received any reply to several inquiries made, their registration form is buggy, and their 'news' section mostly has news from 2008. All red flags to me.
iKobo: another provider named in the other topic and at Wikipedia (for what it's worth...). However, their SSL certificate is expired. Big red flag.
I've gone over most of the cards mentioned at this review site, but they all appear to be tailored to the US.
So my question is: does anybody know a good payment solution (could be Prepaid Debit Cards, could be something else) that is suitable for paying a wide audience of international users?
NOTE: these are mostly larger payments in the range of $100-500.
In the UK there are two providers: Caxton (Visa) and Fairfx (Mastercard). Their cards are called currency cards rather than prepaid debit cards, but I believe they are exactly what you are describing. Both are fully registered under UK financial law, so are reputable and reliable. Both are usable in a very wide range of countries. They are both usable in many, though not all ATMs (for instance in Thailand, they are usable in ATMs in local supermarkets, but not in local money changing kiosks). In addition to the problems #hol mentions about ATMs, in Asia in particular, local banks can, and do, choose to stop receiving payments from one of the two major networks - usually Mastercard - if there has been a high level of fraud on that network in that particular country.
I believe Caxton also offer a variety of money transfer options at low cost, but I have not used these services.
I have used both providers in travelling round 11 countries this year, mostly in the developing world, including Laos which has the least developed financial system of all the countries visited. They have provided a reliable and useful service. I have no other connection with either provider.
Whatever method you choose, you should be very careful not to fall over laws against money laundring. I am not sure sending around prepaid debit cards is legal.
My own instant idea was bankwire or paypal (or Skrill - moneybookers). Western union I remember as expensive but I might be wrong.
Working in international payments for banks in my professional career I know how money moves around the world and I must say the pre-paid debit card idea is a not too bad an idea and actually quite innovative. I looked at the payoneer thing and I think it looks OK.
I wonder if there are hidden costs but does not look like it. The only costs not visible is for sure the extra charge from the ATM provider in the foreign country charges in addition to the pre-paid debit card provider.
One thing came to my mind: Make sure the receiver can use the card at ATM's in his country. Nowadays almost all cards can receive money at any ATM in the whole world but I would not take it for granted. In worst case the payee has to go to a big airport where ATM machines are more internationalized. Ask the payee what symbols/names his nearest ATM shows. Then ask the hotline if the card can receive money at that ATM. E.g. is EFTPOS supported etc.
On bankwire it depends on the receiving country and some countries tend to do a rip off in charges. I guess you are in the US. I do not know if banks provide the service but UBS Switzerland has a "guaranteed OUR charge" that allows you to make bankwires anywhere in the world where the receiver pays nothing and you are charged a max of 20 CHF plus the regular bankwire charge (I think around 15 CHF to foreign countries). Foreign bankwires from the US also seem to be ridiculously expensive. I just looked up what Bank of America charges. OMG.
Bankwire I would discourage for some countries. I had some bad experience with a certain country once and maybe times changed. Check with the payee first and rather make a test with a smaller amount if it is a rather to corruption tending country. They may think this is money against something exported and want papers and all that before releasing the money...
Of course you still can go back to cash or cheques which have the problem to be very slow and get lost in the mail (but your cards also need to be mailed) and cheques in international traffic tend to have big charges and cash has poor exchange rates.
At last, you should really ask the payees for suggestions, too.
Couldn't you ask some of your users, or people in the countries that are in similar circumstances?
And Western Union Money Transfer is widely known for being able to pay people in a lot of countries.
I would use paypal or, if they accept it, bitcoin.
Skrill (formerly MoneyBookers) may also be an option as they provide an accompanying MasterCard pre-paid card. https://www.moneybookers.com/
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I'm looking for geocoding service, which can provide 1 million queries per day.
I've already read about google/yahoo api, but unfortunately none of them can offer this quantity.
Any help is appreciated.
Google, Yahoo, MapQuest (licensed service) or Microsoft will be more than happy to allow you to use their API with this kind of volume, with their premium plans.
If you want this for free, MapQuest Open runs Nominatim, a free geocoder, based on OpenStreetMap data. This service is not, as of today, rate-limited.
Or, if you want more control, why not set up your own geocoder, based on Nominatim?
I work at SmartyStreets where we specialize in address verification and geocoding. While I'm not sure yet (see my comment to your question) if you are geocoding by address or by IP, I know of some venues you could investigate. I'll start with some general principles then offer a recommendation or two.
There are services that will perform either batch geocoding or geocoding en masse for such large quantities. Ultimately, to service upwards of a million requests daily from a single user, the API you determine to use should have the following characteristics:
Geo-distributed. Latency can easily double the time of a request, and over a million queries in just one day (about 11 queries/sec) can seriously affect your app's performance.
Scalable. If one machine becomes overwhelmed servicing API requests, how will the system cope and service others pending?
SLA with guaranteed uptime. Especially for mission-critical operations, geocoding must not get in your way, and for such a large quantity you want to make sure the availability isn't affected arbitrarily.
Portable/lightweight. In other words, you want something that can output results in a universal format. XML is nice, but often difficult to use and has its limitations. I've personally found JSON to be a great format for sending and receiving data.
Affordable. The premium plans of Google and Yahoo's APIs are generally designed for corporate entities, which carry a hefty cost. Your means may not allow that.
Also keep in mind that Google, OpenStreetMap (Nominatim), Yahoo, and others, don't actually verify the locations they geocode. In other words, you can give Google or OSM an address that doesn't really exist, and it will still give you coordinates --- because they perform address approximation, not address verification. Their purpose is to help you search/find things, but if you need accurate coordinates, you best make sure the address is correct.
Start looking around for APIs like this. I would suggest you start with LiveAddress, and see how it meets your needs. We service millions of requests per day and can easily handle thousands of requests per second, and the data we return to you will only actually exist: no guessing about the addresses. It comes with an SLA, is serviced from 3 data centers across the US, and has a simple JSON output. Response times are generally around 100ms or less (excluding external latencies out of our control).
And by the way, it's free to use for 250 addresses, or queries, per month, which in your case should help you get started real easy...
If you have any further questions, I'll be happy to help you personally.
For free? If so, you won't find such a service from a commercial company like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MapQuest etc. The only way is to pay for more daily queries or to use OpenStreetMap.org (OSM). However, OSM's API does only offer 2,5k queries a day, but you can download the whole map stuff (or even some parts, e.g. particular cities or countries) and put it on your own server. Note, OSM does not offer satelite or street viewing.