Mashery

Over the last 6 months we have been watching an amazing transition in the Web 2.0 world we live in. Both Wikipedia and Tim O’Reilly refer to Web 2.0 as business revolution on the Internet, mostly referring to communities and collaboration platforms. We see Web 2.0 moving to be an interconnection of web services where content and services are delivered at the point and time where users want to consume it.

In recent weeks we have been approached by several Telco’s, all looking to learn from Web 2.0.  We see the early signs of a movement here –a move to Telco 2.0 and the Telco API. Telco 2.0 is a world where web services are open to all 3rd party developers to create new applications and services for telecommunications consumers through a Telco API. Voice, data, and wireless capabilities are extended by the community, driving adoption to specific brands and platforms. Companies like Ribbit, Plazes and Loopt are showing the world how it can be done today.

What can Telco’s learn from Web 2.0?
What are the drivers for Telco 2.0?
Is Telco 2.0 something that can really happen?
All are valid questions worth exploring.

Let’s start with why some Telco’s struggle with what to do and how to do it when it comes to web services. For voice related services there is the concern around performance and availability that have long been the landmark of the Telco business.  You pick up the phone and there is a dial tone, always.  Reliability expectations are high for customers.  Taking these services to web based API’s and matching reliability expectations could be a risky proposition for Telco’s. The general web community has accepted the fact that a free service will have some glitches and down time. In Telco, Skype has experienced some of the growing pains of providing a free service and matching reliability expectations. In non-Telco web-based applications, Twitter is an example of another free service that has been managing that expectation as well (although both appear to have made great strides in recent months to tackle up-time specifically). The web consumer will accept some level of disruption for a free service, the Telco industry needs to wrap its arms around this notion and be comfortable with supporting a service that may not meet its traditional businesses service levels.

The second is privacy concerns around data.  There are very interesting applications that can be made from latent content ranging from billing to CDR data. Of course, making this information available for others to build applications requires that people opt into the use of their information for other services.  This type of problem is solved in the web world today by leveraging new industry standards such as Oauth (in layman terms OAuth is delegated authentication where users opt into sharing data from one application with another application). This is another opportunity for Telco’s to embrace, learn, and extend from Web 2.0.

Other concerns we are hearing from Telco’s have to do with commoditizing key assets of the Telco’s business.  Well, dear Telco’s, it’s happening anyway. In our view, Telco’s must find new ways to participate and leverage their services to help drive innovation and adoption of the platform. Our friends at Best Buy said it well in their presentation at our Business of APIs Conference – “we want to double the size our business in 5 years and it’s going to require innovation – inside and outside the company.”  On the media side of the world, you have companies like Netflix who have opened their customer data and core catalog for commercial and non-commercial use within their API.  Netflix motivations for doing this are key to their success – they don’t care if others make money off of them, as long as these third parties are keeping Netflix engaged in the ongoing use of their service!  We see this as an equally interesting approach for Telco’s.

So who is a good role model for Telco’s in this new Telco 2.0 world?  Orange.  They have done an impressive job of making almost every aspect of their services and their customer data available through APIs.  Everything from SMS and Voicemail access to Contact lists and Calendars.

The Mashery Business of APIs conference last year included Asha Vellaikal from Orange Labs; have a look at her presentation for more insight.

We are just now seeing the interest from major Telco’s across the board.  Why? Smaller niche vendors are creeping into the space and offering services that are valuable to consumers and innovative developers. These niche vendors are entering quickly and providing open, free web based services – and the web consumer has taken notice. This market movement is an opportunity for Telco’s, we believe it’s the basis for Telco 2.0, what do you think?

Are you a Telco and is this in your 2009 plan?  You can learn from other industries that struggle with ownership of content, services, and monetization.  Check out the presentations from the most recent Business of APIs Conference to learn more or contact us directly and we’ll help you out.

Over the last year or so, the travel industry has started to shift more time and attention to local travel. More consumers are traveling local and experiencing destinations near their home as the cost of travel increases.  The ever increasing fuel costs, high unemployment levels and ticket prices (airlines, events, parks, museums, etc.) has lead to the “travel local” mantra. This travel local movement even has a word invented for it “staycation.”

Staycations may be easy if you live in or around, say for example Orlando Florida, and have the means to partake in the parks nearby. But what if you have the need for information about places to visit nearby somewhere with less obvious activity centers? The answer is the web and open content, which is also the opportunity for the Travel Industry. We see immediate opportunities for the travel industry to take advantage of staycations and expand their open content offerings:

• Provide supplemental content and/or programs to local newspapers, chambers of commerce, local parks, museums, etc. Any local travel stakeholder that could benefit from consumers traveling locally. The content could include general travel stats, recommend driving routes, hotel ratings, or points of interest near a hotel, restaurant reviews, etc.

• Invest in partnerships and data sharing agreements with sites that focus on a specific target audience. Staycations require travels sites to get information to people and the site they “belong” to; reach your audience in other places they gather as part of their daily routine. An example target could be a site like Lonely Planet and their Blue List content. Blue List is a site for recommending “anything and everything travel related”. As Russell Johnson, President of California-based TravelMedia, which hosts a trade site at travelmedia and a consumer site at connectedtraveler told TravelDailyNews.com, ‘The Web is becoming a collaborative mesh of activity rather than linear portals.’

• Expand mobile application offerings for people to find interesting information about what is nearby the area they have driven to (places of interest, hotels that are available, etc) via their mobile device

• Don’t forget the casual developer. Maybe a  travel aficionado that wants to create a cool mashup in facebook of not only the places they traveled but the things they have seen, the hotels they stayed, how they got there, ratings, comments, opinions, etc.

What this means from a business perspective for the travel industry is finding new outlets to reach beyond typical travel destination websites. The focus needs to be on niche and local activity oriented sites.  These sites range from the likes of City Search to city specific websites and guides or even local travel on Yahoo.

Creating new distribution channels means making your content and services easily available to others through web services.   While the travel industry is just starting to move in this direction, other industries fighting the economic changes have started to make the move.  Industries including the likes of retailers and media companies.

Are you in the travel industry? Has the model of staycations affected how you present your business data online, how you make content available, your partners, your overall business? Drop us a comment here. Or better yet, if you will be attending the PhoCusWright Conference, come visit us, we will be exhibiting.

Clay Webster, Associate Vice President Platform Infrastructure at CBS Interactive; Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application Development, NPR Digital Media; and Marc Frons, CTO, New York Times each gave a presentation about how their organization was using managed APIs. The three then joined moderator Quentin Hardy, Senior Editor and Silicon Valley Bureau Chief of Forbes.

All three organizations are making extensive use of APIs, but in different ways:

• CBS Interactive uses a strategy of facilitating internal development first, then providing capability for transfer across business units, followed by access to partners and finally ecosystem developers.
• NPR Digital Media’s target audience includes end users, the in-house team, member stations, business partners, and content aggregators like search engines.
• The New York Times limits noncommercial use, but provides access to its information through five different APIs.

CBS Interactive makes extensive use of APIs for communication between business units, and some of those units (last.fm in particular) have been having great success with their published APIs, while others are still focusing primarily on internal and cross-unit use.

NPR Digital Media’s job is to push NPR’s extensive content archives out to the world in digital form. While there are use restrictions on some of the content, NPR is providing over 13 years of content, over 250,000 unique stories, and over 400,000 unique audio files. The public API was only recently released, but already has almost 1,000 registrants, 4.3M API calls, and 200,000 views in the developer support area.

The New York Times has a wide variety of online initiatives, with the purpose of supporting these goals:

• Syndication
• Innovation
• Journalism
• Branding
• New Business Models

Daniel Jacobson pointed out that content publishers have lagged behind content aggregators in providing APIs, but as these panelist revealed, the laggards are catching up.

After Heidi Tucker’s talk, Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint, outlined his plans to roll out an API with the help of Mashery.

Mint

Mint is the number one online personal finance application, with over 600,000 users. The company interacts with more than 7,500 banks and brokers, and sees over $1B in spending each day. This gives Mint a unique insight into what is happening in the U.S. consumer economy.

The company has been accumulating aggregate data behind the scenes. Although it is not a data company, Aaron sees the company moving in that direction. If Mint could give access to that aggregate data, a host of new and useful applications could spring forth from developers.

As Mint moves forward with Mashery to roll out its managed API, Aaron wants to:

• Ensure development quality
• Develop widgets
• Distribute the API to press and partners
• Charge for deeper access to the data
• Control usage and billing via Mashery