API

After several days of eating your grandmother’s chocolate covered, sugar coated butter cookies, you may decide it’s time to hit the gym. Although… don’t you deserve another cookie just for thinking about getting off the couch?

If your dieting resolve tends to waver around triple-decker fudge bars and marshmallow cream pies, don’t worry. These mobile apps can help you stick by your New Year’s resolution no matter what goal you want to accomplish.

Carrots and Sticks

My first Mashery recruiting assignment came last year. When recruiting for an expansion stage technology startup that provides a product that most people aren't entirely sure of, you need to be tremendously compelling in your first message.  This was challenging because I always found myself first having to explain what an API was and then why an API management solution was so important.

Although Santa doesn’t have his own API (I’m sure he is very saddened by this), he does have a few mashups that focus on him that were made with the help of some awesome APIs.  These range from Santa trackers (there is even some drama surrounding this category) to Christmas light display locators, and they are all very festive and sure to get you into the holiday spirit!

Smartphones and tablets continue to top Christmas lists this year, as the mobile revolution sweeps into 2013. But Santa is increasingly fielding app requests, too, since even smartphones aren’t terribly bright without quality content.

Are you scrambling to finish (or start) your holiday shopping? Don’t worry! These apps can help you select, buy and save money on perfect gifts for your family and friends.

If you’re stumped about what to get your adolescent nephew, for example, El Gifto can make your life easier. The free app suggests presents based on age, gender, interests, and yes, even the recipient’s ego. It lets you set price limits too so you don’t accidentally fall in love with an $800 purse you never knew you needed.

Last week, Mashery Platform Strategy Director, Chuck Freedman, wrote about a few strategies to help your API platform achieve its business goals.  This is part two of that post, covering strategies 4-6 from Chuck’s Business of APIs talk, which he presented earlier this fall. 

4.  Establishing Effective Partner Engagement

Amazon and Facebook recently announced new developer tools.   Amazon now offers free A/B testing capability for Kindle Fire developers and Facebook’s changes made it so their developer documentation automatically generates from its source code.   

Did you know that your digital data isn’t just for those you follow on Twitter or people on your friends list on Facebook?  There is a large, growing and yet unregulated market for your digital information. It’s not uncommon for data about you to be consumed by your doctor’s office, your car or even your refrigerator.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Google made a big splash this week with the release of its much-anticipated Google Maps for iPhone.  The wait is finally over and we can all move on from our complaining about the lack of public transportation directions and the inaccuracies of Apple Maps to figuring out which app we like best.  I won’t try to do a side-by-side comparison of the two apps – many, more qualified people have done this already (this is a pretty insightful and comprehensive review). 

Companies that back their API offering with a strategic approach can experience a measurable success. We guide companies with existing and new APIs to understand their business goals and implement or create strategies that drive success.

On Friday, Part I of this series covered the broad strokes of what is one of the integration spaces’ pivotal annual gatherings, Gartner’s Application, Architecture Delivery and Integration Summit (AADI). This show sets the coming year’s tone for application integration at Fortune 500 companies, and to a degree for the integration space as a whole. At the last two shows, that tone has been spelled out clearly: A-P-I.

Last week was a good one for APIs in Las Vegas. Gartner brought together the enterprise architecture and integration crowd for its annual Application Architecture Delivery & Integration Summit.  The annual show focused on corporate app development and the integration/API/SOA space is something central to the mobility challenges of today’s enterprise.

There's a paradox out there -- the more innovative and diverse the myriad of employee-owned devices and digital channels a company uses to scale, the less insight that company has into how these new business avenues contribute to business value.  As we near the end of the year, the advent of measurable business objectives, metrics and reports hang in the not-so-far future.

Talk of the cloud has been around for several years now.  Up to know, however, the majority of cloud usage has come from “transformational companies” (11% of companies accounted for 44% of cloud adoption in 2010).  This is beginning to change, however. 

At Mashery we are very interested in the business of APIs (if you missed our Business of APIs conference earlier this fall, you should check out some videos of the sessions).  We love to talk about the benefits APIs bring to businesses all across different verticals.  From growing your brand awareness to internal development of new apps/products, APIs can make your business function better, faster and more efficiently.