If you're a Windows Phone 7 developer, you would probably have heard us talk about this Kirkland, Wash. startup. To recap, it was founded by David McLauchlan (CEO), and Jeff MacDuff (CTO). Both are former Microsoft employees with Dave doing work on the Zune hardware business amongst others, and Jeff working on a range of products including that Windows Phone 7 you're clutching.
Although the platform has been out since last year, up until now it has been in beta. But today they have finally hit v1, along with a bunch of exciting announcements.
So what's new? Well, in addition to the info in the quote below, Buddy has now got support for the Aviary image filters - which has recently been included in Rowi. Along with that, there is now a native .NET SDK which makes it absolutely painless to use the platform in your own app, plus is the first SDK that supports Windows 8! I have personally used the SDK in a Windows 8 app, and it was simpler than the time I stole candy from a baby (I didn't really, promise). The SDK also successfully passes the Windows App Certification Kit (WACK), which is required to publish apps into the Store, and is failed by pretty much every other 3'rd party library due to broken dependencies.
We know what you're thinking though...what good is a press release without an infographic? So we have two, just for you (and the thousands of others like you)...
The abridged press-release follows:
Buddy Platform, Inc. NEWS SNAPSHOT:
- Buddy is announcing the initial closing of our $1 million seed round, concurrent with the full public release of our backend as a service platform
- Seed round was led by Bay Area VC “Transmedia Capital”, with participation by Bay Area VC “Crestlight Venture Productions”
- Angels from Seattle, California, Colorado, Taiwan and Australia participated in the round - We’re announcing that over 6,000 developers are developing apps using Buddy, and so far more than 5,500 apps are in various stages of development with us
- Buddy is announcing the world’s first back end as a service .NET SDK designed specifically for Windows 8 application developers
- We’re announcing that amongst the new APIs and functionality being released tomorrow, is support for Aviary.com image filters accessible via Buddy APIs for any connected device and any OS platform. This is a huge win for developers looking for “Instagram-style” image filters without needing a full SDK, and will bring Aviary-functionality to emerging platforms like SmartTVs, web apps, etc…
- We’re releasing a new website, overhauled developer documentation and a completely new “Developer Dashboard” which shows in real-time the current performance and activity of an app
- You can see it in action by visiting http://dev.buddy.com and logging in with demo@buddy.com, password is “demo” - To celebrate our launch, we’re offering free access to the Platform for up to 2 million API calls per month, through July 31st 2012.
The platform is also free until August - so hit the link below to sign up!
Source: Buddy
