apps grant wishes

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Success in retail equals selling more and more “things”.  For traditional brick and mortar retailers, that means getting people in the doors and keeping them there long enough to make a purchase.   With the advent of the Internet, these traditional retailers have had to adapt and create websites to allow their shoppers to shop online.  Now that the vast majority has figured out websites, mobile is bringing a new threat to the traditional retail model.

As our modern-day society evolves into a more interconnected ecosystem via ubiquitous Internet connectivity and the adoption of diverse device usage, we are also noticing that there is growing demand for quality developers and programmers. This trend of a more forward-thinking digital society has driven companies to not only realize, but also prioritize developments in creating faster, more efficient and user-friendly digital services and applications.

Some of my favorite stories emerging from the app economy are those of apps that actually created platforms. In most cases, these platforms emerge from vision and strategy where the backend driving the app can and should be available to serve a larger ecosystem. The following stories are of companies that saw the potential of their functionality beyond their own successful apps.

Functionality infusion with Sincerely

At this moment, we’re in the thick of the U.S. presidential election season—the Republican nominating convention is about to start and the Democratic one is just around the corner. Only a few weeks ago, the world was abuzz with the London Olympics, and now many of us are thinking about Labor Day, Back to School, NFL games, elections, and on to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, into the holidays.

So, why APIs? For retailers, the answer is in your pocket. When was the last time you used a shopping app while inside a store? Or made a “spur of the moment” online purchase? Back in February, Forrester analyst Brian Walker laid this logic on retailers at eTail Palm Springs (Optimizing Your Business for the Era of Agile Commerce) in a message to retailers that: you have to go slow, to go fast.

In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in mobile devices and smartphones plunging into mainstream, giving millions of people the capability to browse the Internet, watch movies and stream music anywhere, without ever having to find a place to sit down and boot up a laptop or desktop. In fact, in a recent Gartner report, worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached a whopping 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, where open OS smartphone devices made up over 36.7% of all mobile device sales.

There’s no arguing that the 2012 London Olympics are the most connected games ever. Via television, Web, radio or Twitter, the up-to-the-minute updates are pervasive. A sheer platitude of Olympic apps and gizmos offer up various bite-sized updates tailored to many tastes. All this, of course, comes courtesy of various APIs from news and other data sources. But are apps alone enough to deliver this data?

What makes a firm stronger than its competitors? Many things, of course: better products, better distribution, a better brand, more efficient manufacturing, and so on. But in the post-website, apps-everywhere economy, one technology powers all of these.

That it goes by the cocktail-party-conversation-killing name of “application programming interface”—or its equally unsexy acronym—is unfortunate (not least of all for those of us in the API management industry). But that doesn’t change the important new reality:

APIs are now the primary source of competitive advantage in business.

I’ve been blogging recently about how APIs are the New Currency. There are many factors in this equation, but one industry literally illustrates the changes I’m describing: financial services.

Companies in this arena have been all over the map in adapting to change. From putting ATMs in non-banking locations to deploying mobile applications, it’s often been a story of resistance followed by embrace. That’s because every change has required relinquishing control, broadening boundaries and taking risks, and for many that’s a tall order.

We recently announced I/O Wraps and I/O Alfred, two developer tools launched to the open source community last week at OSCON.

Have you checked out Mashery's Apps We Like? Each week we will be featuring 2 new amazing applications built on the powerful APIs of Mashery customers.

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