Mashery

A note from Oren Michels, CEO –

This year, the Mashery team got together and decided to do something special for a family who lacks the resources to make the holidays as special as the rest of ours. Through a friend who volunteers at an amazing program called the Tenderloin Childcare Center we learned about the Cervantes family. Initially a family of five, a couple months ago they added three more children to the mix when their three nieces moved in after the girls’ father murdered their mother.

The TLC staff provided us with names, ages, sizes and preferences for each of the six kids and the parents, and the Mashery team went shopping. Today, we delivered a wonderful pile of presents – ranging from toys to clothes to kitchen appliances to gift cards to cash – to the TLC, who will pass them on to the Cervantes family. We loaded a taxi to the gills with presents, and I’m told that there were tears in the eyes of the TLC staff when the gifts were dropped off.

It’s an honor to work with such warm, generous people. Despite the usual end-of-year rush (we also managed to sign several very nice new customers in the past week, and likely will close a couple more before year end), everyone found time to shop, wrap and give.

I wish everyone on the Mashery team (and our customers, vendors, partners and investors) a wonderful and joyous holiday season. Thanks for all you do. 2010 is going to be amazing!

Reposted from Oren’s blog, Praxis

The business of APIs is exploding around us with Mashery signing on more and more clients, large and small. Open APIs and the potential in developing a program hasn’t been an easy story to tell so we’re thrilled that brands are starting to catch on.

We were ahead of the curve when we launched three years ago trying to explain mashups and the value behind open data. We’re obviously not scared of a challenge.

And neither is our new client BlankSlate Factory, Inc., a newly established NY-based startup that’s bridging legacy organizations and systems into simple-to-implement and flexible API providers. BlankSlate can turn any data supply, across multiple sources, into a single, accessible API data resource. Now any company can have full readable, writeable, and shareable APIs – with controls and permissions dictated by the data provider – with no coding or special integrations required.

For example, BlankSlate just launched a new API project called Blocks And Lots for NYC BigApps, a software challenge hosted by New York City:

The NYC BigApps Competition will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users.

The project plan called for the aggregation of 45 file sources from three different city agencies; processing more than five million records in a mere few days. (It would take longer than that to build a system that would integrate all that data into a single databank!)

Visit the BigApps site, place a vote, and support API innovation.

(Voting ends January 7^th)

With Blocks And Lots New York City now has a simple API that can be used for internal record searches as well as external development. It’s a solution that allows New York to leverage the power of APIs to share information and create useful applications to benefit both the private and public sector. And BlankSlate is built on cloud computing infrastructure which allows it to scale up as far as is required, handling loads of tens of millions of records with ease.

Open APIs present a valuable opportunity for any business that wants to create additional revenue streams and creative partnerships with third party developers. BlankSlate has created a way to eliminate the initial API-build challenge and opens doors to enterprise, government, non-profit, SMB and all other cost-conscious and IT-light organizations who want to explore the possibilities.

Additionally, BlankSlate’s APIs can be used to build brand new applications, extend existing applications, and expand enterprise systems into the cloud (see links for examples).

Visit BlankSlate.com to get more company information and request an invitation to their private beta. Follow @BlocksAndLots on Twitter and see the site for details on the application and get access to their widget.

The attendees at Mashery sponsored “The Business of APIs Conference” were treated to a great discussion by Quentin Hardy from Forbes and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. If you are in retail or media and you are not leveraging APIs to share the great content you have, this great advice from Fred should help ignite the API flame within your company.

This presentation, given at Mashery’s “The Business of APIs” Conference in New York, kicked off a great day for all attendees. It helped set a foundation for where APIs are today, their current use as a part of a company’s business strategy and what the future holds for the use of APIs.