Mashery

API Leader is First Step for Location-Based Applications

San Francisco, CA, August 18, 2010 — Mashery, the leading provider of API (Application Programming Interface) management and strategic services announced today an impressive lineup of customers powering geographically relevant applications. From providers of location based information like Quova to location specific databases like Homefinder.com and CityGrid® to local subject specific services like WeatherBug and Allmenus, APIs provide a platform approach to fostering an ecosystem of developers and multitude of applications leveraging highly relevant data.

“Location awareness is a key building block in so many of today’s most popular and successful mobile apps,” said Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery. “The availability of a diverse set of location APIs provide developers the means to create a compelling mobile experience around a broad range of content and services. With so many consumers accessing the Internet on the go, where you are has become an integral part of who you are. Your location informs how you want to interact with the application, its underlying services, your social graph and the people and places in your vicinity. With APIs that provide location awareness, local content and localized services, Mashery is able to offer our community of over 50,000 developers a holistic approach for developing the next-generation of location aware applications.”

“Building our developer portal with Mashery made the most sense for us to speed the delivery of Quova’s API, making our tools and geolocation dataset readily available to developers of all kinds,” said Marie Alexander, CEO, Quova, Inc. “We are pleased to be part of the Mashery community.”

Mashery is helping provide the API infrastructure that allows for more localized content for popular tools, including:

HomeFinder.com is a popular real estate site with 3.5 million property listings that connects home buyers, sellers and real estate professionals. HomeFinder.com uses Mashery’s API services to enable its 130+ online newspaper partners, including the Chicago Tribune, Arizona Republic and Miami Herald, to weave local property listings, community data and school statistics into their Web sites and print real estate sections.

CityGrid® is the largest content and ad network for local, aggregating more than 700K paying advertisers, enhanced listings and content for 18M businesses, and reaching more than 140M unique users across 250 web and mobile sites. CityGrid® utilizes Mashery’s API management services to give developers access to their content rich set of APIs which enable them to access CityGrid’s content and its monetization platform.

WeatherBug, a brand of AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc., manages and operates the largest global weather network and provides products and services for consumer and professional use. WeatherBug is launching a set of new APIs with Mashery that include tile-based raster images for radar, satellite, temperatures, humidity, pressure and winds that can be easily added to Google and Bing maps.

Allmenus, the leading national resource for restaurant menus and online ordering, along with sister site Campusfood, is part of the Dotmenu network.  Mashery’s API service will be used to syndicate Allmenus’ trove of content, covering 8,000 US cities, to local content partners.  APIs made available will include restaurant menu links, content, and online food ordering.

Quova geo-data powers businesses, large and small, around the globe. This data enables them to instantly identify where a visitor to their site is geographically located; to geotarget advertising and content; detect card-not-present fraud; manage distribution of digital content; and comply with local laws. Quova invites developers to play with its data for free, in order to see what can be created using the most detailed demographic and accurate network characteristic data about an IP address available. The company is based in Mountain View, California.

About Mashery

Mashery’s API management tools and strategic services help companies connect with customers and partners in a changing digital world by extending reach across devices, markets and the Web. Mashery leads the industry with a holistic approach for API initiatives—from setting platform strategy and measuring business objectives to the heavy lifting of providing and managing infrastructure to facilitating relationships with our 50,000-strong network of Web and mobile application developers. Our knowledge, experience and proven strategies enable companies to focus on their core business while driving sales, building new revenue channels and realizing faster time-to-market for innovative applications. Mashery was founded in 2006 and has built an impressive list of clients that include Best Buy, Netflix, and the New York Times. For more information, visit www.mashery.com.

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Media Contact:

Aimee Eichelberger
(415) 963-4174 ext. 7
aimee (at) bordergratehouse.com

Mashery “Apps We Like” features applications that are leveraging Mashery customer APIs.   To learn more about these apps and why we like them, visit www.mashery.com/appswelike

To kick off Apps We Like, the following five apps received the official “Apps We Like’ badge:

Super DVD Robot (http://superdvdrobot.com/) – Super DVD Robot provides a way for movie lovers to rate films, list their collections for rating, raving, and community loans, or search for new films, finding titles they want both on and offline.

InstantWatcher.com (http://instantwatcher.com/) – InstantWatcher enables you to search and choose among the streamed movies of the Netflix catalog. Learn more about movies, before or after, with the New York Times extensive movie reviews.

Xobni (http://www.xobni.com/) – Xobni for Outlook is a sidebar tool that provies better email inbox management, plus contact information like previous conversations, social network data, and shared attachments.

Camelbuy (http://camelbuy.com/) – Camelbuy provides price and availability changes on customer-selected products. Notifications are delivered by email, Twitter, and RSS feeds. Also offers price history and trends, and a dashboard of all products selected with product descriptions.

Gracenote (http://www.gracenote.com/) – Gracenote puts artists and fans closer together with richer interactions of cataloged and discoverable music.

Mashery’s “Apps We Like” will be on-going and will add new apps weekly to showcase the real value that Mashery powered APIs deliver.  Come back often to learn more about the apps we like, the developers that build them, and the Mashery managed APIs that they leverage.

Come meet up with the Mashery team at OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon, July 19-23. Our Chief Architect, Clay Loveless, is speaking about avoiding the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in APIs on Thursday, July 22 at 10:40am. That evening, Mashery is hosting an OSCON API Hour summertime beer bash from 7-9pm, along with our co-sponsor Twilio, and our API friends over at Etsy, Netflix, The New York Times, and CityGrid Media.

Join us for the OSCON API Hour at The EastBurn, located on East Burnside Street. The OSCON API Hour will feature local Portland favorite microbrews and appetizers, plus skeeball, pinball, video games and music. Your OSCON badge gets you access to our open bar API Hour for OSCON attendees! Plan to join us starting at 7pm and start your last night of OSCON off right.

OSCON is where developers learn how cloud computing is transforming their toolkit. APIs are flourishing, and developers are adapting to a rapidly evolving application development landscape with Web scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript and more. Mobile services are also growing exponentially for app developers, set alight by Android and iOS.

If you are interested in attending OSCON 2010, you can register using our friends and family discount of 20% off registration. Just reference discount code os10s20d.

See you in Portland!

-Team Mashery

If you are in operations or engineering in a technology business, you can probably still remember most of the details of the worst outage you’ve managed through.  That cold sweat moment when your monitoring systems starts alerting, your phone starts vibrating and beeping, your adrenaline hits and all you can think of is logging on (despite prior commitments to the kids, wife and/or dog).  You’re trying to get shell access, but the systems are overloaded and it’s taking for-e-ver.  Instant messaging starts lighting up with messages from your guys.  Your boss is calling on your cell phone amongst the flurry of SMS messages.  You try to block out all the noise because you just need time to start figuring out what’s happening.  Ugh. External load. Out of capacity.  Now what?

This past week, Twitter broke new volume records, but also broke another record, poor availability for their API. As someone responsible for a product’s availability, I feel for the team over there.  I can just about feel the stress level and the fatigue of the guys in the trenches.  I’m sure they did awesome work managing through it and need a break… but here comes another big weekend for them: World Cup Quarterfinals and Tour de France.  *Sigh*.  Ops guys are heroes.  They deserve their nicotine, caffeine, beer and doughnuts.

All of this has me thinking about what we do at Mashery.   We spend a lot of time thinking about all aspects of running successful API programs, from strategy, to developer outreach, to launches to operations.  We’ve learned a lot about running programs in a variety of different industries and environments.  Watching what happened to Twitter over the past week makes me think of a few operational lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Rate limiting and throttling is necessary.

Some will call foul on this since you’re effectively turning away business, but it’s reality.  I wish there was such a thing as infinite capacity.  Even if you have the good fortune to have tons of it, make sure you still have a way to hit the panic button and rate limit if necessary.  Twitter has one of the world’s biggest APIs, and when they broke their volume record due to the World Cup, throttling traffic is what allowed them to stay afloat.  It can happen on a 100 QPS API or a 3200 QPS API.  And really people, have a way to do this outside of modifying your code.  When you need the panic button, you shouldn’t be calling engineering and worrying about whether the build is good.

Separate traffic and developer management from your backend API servers.

APIs are different than websites.  With your website, you mostly know things like concurrent connections and bandwidth.   When you max capacity, there’s not a ton you can do but start adding or turn some things off for everybody and ride out the wave.  But if you’ve done it right with an API and have traffic controls with developer management in front of your API, you have a shot at managing the wave rather than just hoping it dies down.

Firstly, having a traffic management layer allows you to limit load on your backend while you try to login and troubleshoot your situation.  If you use a service like Mashery, you can apply maintenance blocks, turn off certain less important endpoints/methods, or even just throttle back how much traffic you’ll accept while politely blocking the rest with fast response error messages.

Secondly, an API done right has a developer management component in your front edge.  With this in place, you actually know which developers/partners/applications are sending you traffic and you can make more focused decisions.  In Twitter’s case, they didn’t pick and choose who would get the most capacity (as far as we know publically).  Instead, they chose a general ratcheting down of access rights to all developers in their community; probably the right political choice for them to make.

For lots of other companies though, not all developers or partners are created equal.  In this situation, picking which applications to allocate the most capacity to might be critical.  A retailer may need to ensure specific applications are 100% available on cyber-Monday. Maybe you need to manage specific contractual obligations if you have a pay-for-access API with SLAs.  Or maybe a certain app is launching on iTunes today and you want to protect its success.  Having the visibility into developer specific traffic and the ability to throttle or limit each independently is necessary in these situations and requires this component on your front edge.

Additionally, in a moment of purely coincidental yet serendipitously beneficial timing, Mashery announced yesterday the expansion of our traffic and developer management capabilities with the release of API Access Tiers. This enables our customers even more capability to help them easily group their developer partners to easily prioritize traffic given their business objectives. When that panic button is needed, you can make simple UI driven decisions for whole tiers of developer partners.

While we’re advocates of using API analytics to plan capacity and avoid outages all together, the reality is that unplanned for events happen.  Having tools in place for managing traffic is a great way keep business running smoothly and help ops guys get home to their families.  After all, that’s a worthwhile cause.

- Chris Lippi, VP of Product and Operations