I’m delighted to relay to you that the brand new Tesco Labs API is now live. This next-generation API use the latest cloud tech to give you access to grocery product information at Tesco. Tesco Labs software engineer Pablo Coberly has posted an article on the Tesco Labs website introducing the new API and the new developers’ portal to set up your dev account. I’ve already created an account and I’m coding a test app (called, of course, Testy McTestFace) to try it out. This ne

UPDATE: All working now! Well done Adrian and the Tesco Labs engineering team. https://secure.techfortesco.com/tescoapiweb/login.aspx — Hello if you’ve reached this blog when you thought you were going to techfortesco.com’s API server. It’s OK, my lovely ex-colleagues at Tesco Labs are sorting out a new server to host the API and it will be back online shortly. You won’t have to do anything, it should all work just as it did before. Please be patient with them. Cheers Nick #

Innovation in Data Data is important, but my passion is for open data. That’s data that is freely available in data files that you can download and import into a spreadsheet or database. Another way is to connect to a special web service called an Application Programming Interface or API. I wrote the original Tesco Grocery API as it gave me a platform to try out new ideas with customers, as well as get third party developers involved in creating great experiences. I discuss t

Over the past week I have been working with my colleagues to tune the Application Programming Interface (API) service that supports communications from all our apps, now that our TV advertising campaign has brought many new customers to the joy of mobile grocery shopping. Anecdotal evidence shows that we can support five times the numbers of simultaneous customers using their mobile phones than we could just a few days ago. It’s been a tremendous learning curve to make the co

Last night we submitted our most ambitious mobile application yet to Nokia’s OVI app store. It’s a simple but complete grocery home application which allows you to search for products and add them to your online basket. It has full access to your favourites and all special offers so you can shop for groceries on the move. You can even amend an order that is checked-out awaiting delivery in order to add to (or alter) the basket or delivery slot. The app is synchronised with yo

A short time ago I responded to our leadership team’s concerns that the grocery API, still very much an R&D project (and on its own service) at this time, may not cope with the load when we come to launch our mobile grocery applications soon. Having built up some skills and experience in using Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Computing platform, I offered that up as a possible solution. After all, the grocery API is built in Microsoft.Net as an ASP.Net application with a Microsoft SQL

I’m just back from one of my splendid ‘cycling and cider’ holidays in Cornwall – mountain biking through the fantastic trails set up around Calstock and Gunnislake in the day, delicious local cider procured from any one of a number of local cider farms in the evening (and it’s important to get it that way round). While I was away, Apple finished quality-assuring the latest version of Tesco Finder, which now supports barcode scanning through the iPhone’s camera. Management and

It’s OK: message received loud and clear. Both customers and colleagues have been emailing / commenting that there are now three Tesco apps for the iPhone but absolutely none for anything else and that frankly they are getting a bit bored waiting. It’s even reached Twitter: ScaredyCat: @techfortesco: getting a bit bored with tesco iphone only stance. There are other phones. Well there’s only one person to blame for all this and that’s me. I started all this nonsense(!) about

Developers following the build of the new Tesco Grocery API, (an R&D project that allows third-party access to our grocery service through their own applications) may well have questioned a consequence of enormous download counts for our iPhone Clubcard app. The question: If we had similar downloads for the forthcoming Tesco iPhone Grocery app, how will the API cope if it is still in R&D? The blunt answer is that it won’t. My tests have shown that currently the API service c

So now it’s snowing outside Tesco.com HQ and suddenly I feel Christmassy. It adds to the warm glow that we’ve now exceeded 50,000 downloads of Tesco Finder for iPhone and the daily download count averages 600. Not bad for an R&D app. The great news is that we’re finalising a greatly updated version that allows you to shop for products in-store without the need for a live internet connection given that some of our stores seem to be very good at shielding customers from mobile

If you attempt to use Tesco Finder’s “Town/City Search” function to locate a Tesco store manually, you’ll find you get the message, “I couldn’t connect to Google.com. Please check your network connection or try again later.“. So what’s happening? Basically we’ve programmed Tesco Finder to use Google’s geo-search API, where we pass on the town or city name you typed in and get back the latitude and longitude of that place. We then use that data instead of iPhone’s location to

I’m delighted to tell you that our first iPhone application has just gone live in Apple’s iTunes App Store. The Tesco Store and Product Finder not only helps you to locate your nearest UK Tesco store (of any size from Express to Extra) but also will help you find any grocery product in that store by describing its aisle and shelf. The application is free and available worldwide although it only works for UK stores and only with grocery products (rather than non-food items) at

Dear Tesco API Developer This is an update to let you know the status of the beta edition of the Tesco API is not quite ready. The underlying ‘Martini’ grocery platform on which the beta API relies is still being tuned up, and the side effect of this work is that the sand keeps shifting beneath the beta API’s feet. Of course we need to make sure that the new grocery service is not only fully functional but performs really well, so these final adjustments are vital before we s