Business of APIs Conference

APIs have helped the The Yellow Pages Group Canada (YPG) go from phonebooks to an online communications giant with exponential and continued growth. YPG began life as a directory publisher for Bell Canada in 1908.

Photo of Victoria Barret (Left) and Wendy Lea (Right) speaking at The Business of APIs conference in San Francisco last Fall. 

Wendy Lea fell in love with the idea of creating, driving and connecting the meaningful conversations between companies and their customers.

She found a home doing that as the CEO of Get Satisfaction, a community-based platform that helps companies engage with their customers and in turn, gain product insight and enhanced customer loyalty.

We took a look at Internal APIs, or APIs within a company, in our post earlier this week and were reminded of the Olympic-sized benefit Coca-Cola Enterprises internal API and ordering app gave them during the summer Olympics in London last year.

Here at Mashery, we believe in the transformative nature of APIs.  We hear from our customers and partners every day about the power of APIs to build new business models, new partnerships and new channels.  This fall, our Business of APIs (BAPI) conferences, gave us the opportunity to highlight our customers and how APIs transformed their business. 

ESPN and Cisco provided great examples. Summaries of their presentations are below, but I encourage you to watch the videos in their entirety (links below). 

There are over 8,300 APIs out there today and the number keeps growing.

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.

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. 

The sixth annual Business of APIs (BAPI) conference is moving across the pond to London on November 6, 2012.

We're excited to announce a handful of new speakers who will explain how APIs create competitive advantages in business. They include:

The Business of APIs Conference (BAPI) is here and we are proud to announce San Francisco has sold out! 

Don’t despair if you didn’t get a golden ticket, the event will be live streaming!

We will also be live tweeting, so be sure to follow us @mashery or look for tweets with the #BAPI2012 hashtag.

We’ve all read about tech superstars who dropped out of college or never bothered to go at all, before launching successful startups. In the real world it helps to know a little about what’s actually out there. 

In the past, The Business of APIs Conference (BAPI) has been dedicated to featuring leaders and businesses, successful in the API space, talk of their experiences, knowledge and platform capabilities. For the first time this year, we are taking the opportunity to offer our own expertise to attendees in the form of a training curriculum we call API University. 

We’re less than two weeks from BAPI SF. While you still have a few days left for San Francisco early bird pricing, we want everyone to be up to speed on new speakers and talks that have confirmed. We’ve just announced the addition of the following new speakers and talks to its BAPI conference lineup in each city:

San Francisco:
• GetSatisfaction CEO Wendy Lea will join moderator Victoria Barret of Forbes Magazine for a fireside chat about her journey from traditional partner ecoystems to APIs.

Photo Courtesy of 7-11

If you are looking for a way to illustrate how APIs are a piping hot way to better reach and understand your customers, here’s a tall cup of big brand proof. Your corner store is where APIs meet Main Street to answer a question on everyone’s mind: Obama or Romney?