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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
