New API Makes it Easy to “Cardify” Content

A new card UI metaphor – like those deployed from Google Now, Facebook Paper, Tinder, Pinterest, and others – is rapidly being embraced by developers who want to deliver bursts of bite-sized information that is easy to read and act on, especially on mobile devices. For most organizations across multiple industries, the coding required to aggregate and stream public and private data into a usable card UI is a tedious, time-consuming, manual task.

With a stream-based storage and retrieval architecture at the core of its REST API, CardStreams’ pioneering approach makes it simple to create, manage, curate, and distribute bite-size content in activity streams, feeds, or timelines – and display them as cards with a few lines of code. At the heart of CardStreams API is a developer-friendly hosted platform to put micro-content at the center of amazing user experiences on mobile, web, and desktop applications.

CardStreams co-founders Eric Freeman and David Gelernter are no strangers to paradigm-busting thought. Previously Freeman, a former CTO of Disney Online and Gelernter, the originator of MirrorWorlds (both the book and the software that pre-dated/predicted the Web) co-founded Lifestreams building on Gelernter’s MirrorWorlds ideas from the 1990s — ideas on which today’s pervasive user experience can be traced. Now this experienced technology team has turned their sights to advancing the endless possibilities of micro-content management.

“The card UI metaphor has taken the world by storm, but it’s only the beginning — get ready for micro-content, those meme-sized chunks of information behind every card, which may change the web as we know it.”

Plug and Play API Focused on What Goes on Behind the Cards

CardStreams empowers developers with everything they need to not only use cards to aggregate internal data, external social media activity streams, user-generated content, or high-value business intelligence for the enterprise, but also to quickly deploy those cards as key drivers for transforming the user experience.

“Take a quick glance at today’s most popular social apps and websites and you’ll quickly notice that most content is presented in a set of discrete, card-like visual elements. It’s a simple concept, but it has given designers and content providers a canonical way to present content in small, visual, meme-size chunks, easily consumed on any device,” said Eric Freeman, co-founder of CardStreams. “We’re focused on the micro-content behind those cards, and have built out a sophisticated service and API that allows you to create, curate, aggregate and distribute that content out to your customers, all in a convenient card-based format.”

As a hosted platform, CardStreams offers a complete storage engine for all micro-content, data, or business intelligence in the cloud. Whether data is structured or unstructured, developers can easily store any content, card, activity or even low-level internet-savvy JSON objects in their feeds, and then use CardStreams’ powerful management and filtering system to slice, dice and repurpose content at will. In addition, powerful management and filtering tools make it easy to deliver the right personalized information at just the right time to the right user from any data source – all without spinning up a single server.

Users See the Value

“There is no doubt that the card paradigm is here to stay and CardStreams’ API allows us to rapidly deploy content in the exact way we need to increase user engagement,” said Michael Satow, President and CEO of JDS Therapeutics. “CardStreams made it easy for us to dip our toe in the water to see if we could embrace cards without the risks and costs of deploying a whole development team. Now, we’re looking to add even more card experiences for our users without the headaches and costs typically associated with rolling out a micro-content project.”

Developers can immediately get started with CardStreams for free and easily scale with premium plans that offer more control, support, and unlimited scale with full enterprise SLAs.