On Wednesday (5th August 2009) I attended TJam – a Tesco event to unveil the latest version of their experimental API. The event was hosted at Microsoft’s London offices, and was attended by developers from all over the UK.
The aim of the event was to show off the latest beta of their API and let developers browse through ideas submitted by staff, customers and the public during an earlier event. Around 800 ideas were submitted in total. These included suggestions such as providing a customisable ‘default’ list of items that could be automatically added to the shopping cart; the ability to text a name of an item or a photo of a barcode/label to Tesco to be added to the cart; an alert service to remind you that something you have bought is about to pass its use-by date; TV red-button ordering services and even online dating based on similar shopping preferences!
The Tesco API will allow developers to work with their catalogue of products and provide ordering services through their own websites and applications. Its good to see Tesco take this first step to open up their data, hopefully the other supermarkets follow suit. We hope that Tesco will extend the API in the future to cover clubcard information so that consumers will be able to take control of the data collected about them. Making this data available could help consumers keep track of their purchases over time and lead to some very interesting and potentially useful services being developed.
You can find out more about the API and the TJam event at techfortesco.com.
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