Mashery

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.