Mashery

“The CEO said we have to have a mobile presence this year!”

“The board wants an iphone app asap!”

Are these familiar commandments running through your hallowed halls these days?

Mobilized web sites – they’re fast and easy to do.  iPhone apps – they’re beautiful, but need to be maintained and are not cross-platform.  Sound complicated?  Wonder where to start?  Here are some thoughts on any mobile strategy.

1. Ask the execs, what is success?

“At the end of 2010 what do you want to see in terms of a mobile presence?”  (Is it the number of devices, users, downloads or revenue?)

2. How are you defining ‘mobile’?

A. The number of iPhone Apps
B. All smart phones
C. Any mobile phone
D. GPS devices, Kindles, iPads, DVD Players, TV’s or any future screens that a user may consume data from

If your answer is ‘D’, you’re on the right track!  The digital channel is fragmented unlike any other channel we’ve ever sold through and it’s getting more and more so.

Tom Friedman said the world is flat.  I say the first run at ecommerce, and more broadly the Internet channel in the early 90’s, was flat.  With all the new devices, the internet channel is 4D.  Try graphing your user segments, devices, social networking sites and where your product is available and you’ll feel the complexity in your gut.  “How in the world am I going to be where all of my customers are – front and center?

Step back and think about what has NOT changed – the need to be where the consumer is.  In the 20^th century, retail companies designed teams that knew how to find desirable locations, i.e., where the people were: main street, the mall, on the way to work, etc. They built new storefronts, cost effectively and fast.

Today, the way you get to where the consumers are is by opening up an API that provides programmatic access to your underlying services, data and content.  That way anyone (e.g., internal developers, existing and potential partners, business developers) can come and get appropriate access to your data in a language they understand.

You will cut development costs, increase the number of people that can build for you, and deliver solutions to market much faster.

This is exactly how eBay and Amazon became two of the most successful ecommerce vendors in the world in the mid-90’s.  They understood the need for API’s long before anyone else and reaped the rewards.

This will take guts to socialize in your organization.  You need to be a change agent.  You need to have the capital to walk up to your boss or executive team and say:

“If we develop mobile applications on what we have today, we can get you an iPhone app in a month.  But then everything you want to do after that is going to take just as long and be just as expensive and we’ll never be able to accelerate our development.  The alternative is to take a deep breath, partner with IT and develop the APIs we need.  It might take a few months, but after that, we’ll be able to do the following”:

The following is from Mike Perri, CEO of Mobilesynch, who builds mobile applications for enterprise clients:

1. Time-to-market and Budget savings of an API:

“When clients have an API (like Hoovers) we are able to build a mobile app for them in about 1/2 the time and about 1/3 of the cost as compared to an internal Web service or legacy feeds, which generally need more customization on our end.”

2.  Better user experience because of an API:

“When clients have an API, we’re able to cache all the data and anticipate the mobile users next request of information they might need. The user experience for Web service and feeds is adding another round trip for the additional information request = waiting, waiting, waiting. It doesn’t make a big difference on a desktop, but it makes a big difference for user experience of mobile users.”

3. Richer features available in mobile apps supported with an API:

“When clients have an API, it is much simpler and easier to add on valuable third-party features (mashup) to create a new mobile app that features not only the functionality of the new client API, but also of other third party APIs.”  (These are the “unintended and unpredictable benefits” a company enjoys when they launch an API is extending the reach of their API data into other mobile apps.)

4. New Read/Write capabilities with an API:

“When clients have an API that supports read and write functionality, mobile devices use data (which is usually more current  and up to date than their laptop or desktop) that can be written to the client’s database from the field  much easier, faster and with much less end user evolvement required.”

With an API, you’ll can also integrate with payment engines, social media sites and develop applications to drive conversion rates through deeper, more meaningful, interactions.

An API is right up there with duct tape and Swiss Army knives – one of the most useful tools in the history of mankind.