Why One Global Events API is Better than Many

Campbell Brown
CEO & Co-Founder

Improving the product development process

Utilizing third party APIs like our demand intelligence API, to help create new products, features or services is becoming part of everyday product development. This is being driven largely by the need for businesses to continually evolve as technology changes and the maturing of an API ecosystem, which now helps to service anything from payments to sending triggered emails.

Development teams are no longer encumbered with having to plan, build and maintain something which might not be their teams core capability. Leaving more time, resource and ultimately budget to put towards creating the best possible product for their customers.

This is in essence, why we created our events API – to help development teams evolve faster and provide technology which can unlock immediate value.

A global events API with a difference

We don’t just stop at simplifying the integration process and providing a vast amount of historical, current and future event data in one place, we have created an API with some unique abilities.

Aggregation

The last thing you want to be doing is integrating and maintaining multiple and one dimensional event APIs. That’s why we set about aggregating global events into one source and removing any duplicates as part of the initial processing of the data. From here our global events API starts to take shape as a platform which allows software engineers or data scientists to access multiple streams of data from one integration point versus fragmented and disconnected sources.

Standardisation

“Standardization, so what?” I hear you ask, well quite a lot actually. But first we need to clear things up around what defines an event. Events are not just concerts, festivals, or sports, we absolutely capture those event types but there is so much more when it comes to the events we capture (and what we have planned). We capture any historical, real-time and scheduled events that could in some form positively or negatively impact the profitability of a business. Whether it’s an earthquake occurring in Nepal, through to an impending winter school holiday in the Chinese Province of Jiangsu, we capture these events and store the data in a homogeneous structure.

Enrichment

We enrich all our events with additional data which we use within our ranking algorithm (a rank from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest rank) to help put more context around events. This allows you to understand instances such as if a Hozier concert is going to be bigger or more impactful than a U2 concert (two great Irish artists by the way) happening on the same date in the same city?  This also provides an additional attribute to slice or filter the event data on when developing with our API, so if you only want to access events of a higher rank, of a particular category or label, in a specific location in the next 30 days – you can.

Event Signals

Now that we have aggregated, standardized and enriched the global event data, making all this accessible via our API we wanted to take it to the next level. Enter event Signals, our prediction-based algorithm that allows software engineers or data scientists to:

“unlock new insights within your application, and predict what events will have the greatest impact on your business within specific locations and markets around the world.” –

In a nutshell this means there is the ability to leverage our API to programmatically calculate new insights on what specific events impact your business or businesses you work with. So for example, creating new functionality and in-depth event visibility within a revenue management or business intelligence platform becomes far more accessible, intuitive and easier to maintain.

Do the work once

Every business will have a fairly substantial development roadmap that they are constantly working on. So the last thing you need is to continually re-visit multiple integrations in order to maintain its viability within your business. Having all the event data and intelligence you require, wrapped up in one platform means that you only need to do the work once, all whilst PredictHQ works to make the data smarter.

Accessible event intelligence

Our ultimate goal is to make event intelligence accessible via our global events API, no matter what platform you are using to manage, evolve or innovate within your business. So if you are looking to harness the power of event visibility, then please don’t hesitate to contact us to find out more.