Now email marketing company Constant Contact is ready to unleash a hoard of new on-demand apps thanks to a tool that promises to make it dead simple to build your own Uber-style service.

The SmallBusinessAPI is a web-based service that app developers can use to automatically send orders to local businesses. So far the service, now in beta, only includes dry cleaning businesses, but will be gradually opened to other types of businesses as well.

Constant Contact's chief innovation officer Andy Miller believes the API could eventually be used to create new services that enable users to order all sorts of things from a single app, not unlike Magic or Facebook's forthcoming M personal assistant. In other words, instead of a multitude of "Uber for X" apps, we might have our choice of several different "Uber for anything" apps.