apps

I’m always amazed to hear how fast things happen in the technology industry. It’s true—entire platforms can go from revolution to obsolete seemingly overnight, and we all know of companies that burned bright as startups and then went bankrupt in the blink of an eye. This is what keeps our world so exciting. It’s the new thing, the next thing, the bigger-faster-cheaper model taken to extremes.

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.

This is a guest post by Jake Reichert, a Managing Partner at Above Labs, LLC.

As the mobile payment market has been heating up in the past few months with more and more new entrants (RevCoin launched its mobile payment system at the beginning of June), it is important to ask, what will be the distinguishing feature among all these systems? It is easy to think about the cost to use each system as that distinguishing feature – and there has been a bit of a price war going on between some of the players in the mobile payment space. New and old mobile payment services are trying to lower prices to get more traction.

Here at Mashery, we admire the trendsetting that our customers bring to their markets. This year, creating APIs as products is one of the ways we see customers pushing the envelope in their markets. APIs as products help companies scale across new channels at rapid speeds because they simplify how developers discover, use and compensate companies for their products via APIs.

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.

App of the Day: ShopWise Canada

Powered by the Yellow Pages Group API, ShopWise Canada uses your location to find the hottest deals and all the daily deals around you. With daily deal sites and app as one of the new "in" thing, we're sure you don't want to miss out on ShopWise.

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.

App of the Day: Qup.tv