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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys...

This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...

Edit:

No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer.

Edit2:

Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with. I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to that.

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Watson APIs will be accessible - without the need for an application - as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku) in a couple of weeks. Stay posted!

BlueMix is actually pretty exciting to me; I think IBM has finally stepped up as a competitor in the "cloud" ecosystem where Microsoft has really failed.

uhh, failed according to what?

I personally have seen very few success stories that involved Azure. The messaging coming through to the public is that Azure is buggy and unreliable. I can recall seeing a couple of major downtime incidents ([1] at least) in the last six months, and a significant number of major ones over the last few years (certificate renewal issues, leap day issues, etc [2][3][4]).

I wouldn't choose Azure myself, and I would actively recommend against choosing it to others from what I have seen (unless you are building a solution on .NET/Windows, perhaps). I can't imagine that I'm alone.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-azure-virtual-machine-cloud-...

[2] http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2013/02/24/windows-azure-ser...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5266947

[4] http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/leap-day-glitch-caus...

It's strange to see FUD deployed against Microsoft for once!

"Really failed"? According to Forbes in July of this year[0], Microsoft is second only to Amazon in the cloud market, and gaining. I'm not sure how that counts as a failure, except in the sense that Microsoft makes a popular whipping boy.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-i...

I suspect (but don't have confirmation) that this includes Microsoft's SaaS products like Exchange Online/O365, which are very successful.

I get the impression that Azure specifically as PaaS/IaaS, OTOH, is quite a bit less so. At least compared to AWS.

That sounds great. I'll stay tuned.

That is great! I just signed up with my existing IBM ID. I am enjoying using IBM Watson right now on a customer project, and being able to experiment and learn on my own will both help the effort to help my customer and perhaps use IBM Watson for personal projects. BTW, I like your dev page, with starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks.

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