APIs and Free Services: Baidu Gets Cozy With Developers

Li Ming Yuan, Baidu's Mobile and Cloud Business General Manager

A busy day for the folks behind China’s most-used search engine. Baidu re-launched its mobile browser earlier today at its Baidu World event, then rolled out 3D online maps. But the main meat of Baidu’s annual conference is actually its APIs and platform provided for developers. There are a total of seven of them which we took time to look at more closely. Startups entering China might want to make notes:

1. Personal Cloud Storage (PCS): Developers can leverage on Baidu’s PCS API to store and manage users’ data and files. App users themselves store their own files online and can access their data via multiple devices.

2. Baidu App Engine (BAE): BAE allows Python, PHP, and Java developers to build, test, and release their apps and it comes with fetch URL, task queue, and SQL memcache features. More features will be made available upon request.

3. Mobile test center (MTC): MTC allows developers to test their mobile apps, both web and native, to ensure that your app fits onto your target phones/OS. Baidu claims that MTC can check compatibility within 10 mins across 100+ phones.

4. Site App: Site app turns desktop sites into mobile-friendly sites. Key in your site URL, then drag-and-drop to fit your users’ tastes.

5. Screen X: A technology that allows developers to build apps that enables users to simultaneously log on to play a game and/or edit photos (depending on app function). It also supports multi-tasking across multiple screens and users. There isn’t any page to find out more about Screen X for now. But we will update once it’s available.

6. LBS cloud API: With LBS cloud APIs, developers can manage and organize their own location data, find data based on positioning, and make keywords searches for local businesses and venues etc.

7. Mobile browser with T5 tech: Baidu’s latest update on its mobile browser supports all web standards technology with a HMTL5 test score of 482 (out of a possible 500). This opens up more opportunities to developers (for example, smooth 3D graphics) to build better apps (games especially) on top of the above APIs and cloud server support.