ESPN

With the baseball season now in full swing, the NBA playoffs underway and the Stanley Cup playoffs right around the corner, it is an exciting time for sports.  And for sports APIs.  In the past few months, there have been a number of exciting events that have brought sports data and sports APIs to center stage.

Circus Mashimus at SXSWi was a blast this year! A big thanks to all of our lounge partners and to all who came by! We look forward to more mashups, API showcases, Austin barbeque and seeing y'all again in 2014!

Last week, Mashery attended PennApps, a 40-hour application development competition organized by the students at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 

The bi-annual event is a 40-hour hackathon that brings 500 student designers and developers from around the world together to build and hack. 

Mashery hacks
There were eight hacks built using Mashery APIs. Here are some favorites:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an API strategy specific to enterprise needs.  The strategy discussed in that post is one of dividing data into tiers.  Large companies have virtual landfills full of data, but not all company data is the same.  Some is public, some is for customers only and some is for internal use only.  The API strategy should reflect that.  It should have different tiers that are meant for different users.

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). 

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.

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.

(Image courtesy David Michael Morris on Flickr)

The Mashery Developer Outreach team is always heading out to hackathons and tech events. They have gone to over 60 in 2012 and the year isn’t over yet. We love to see what developers are capable of building in a weekend, or even a day!

Projects at these events are typically are limited in scope. Team building, education and fun are what draws hackers to attend.

The typical stereotype of a Hakathon is a room full of mostly male developers building a mixed bag of hacks, with no specific theme, through a patchwork of APIs and resources.  These stereotypes were shattered at the espnW hack day which combined women, technology and sports, November 9-10 at Stanford University.

Here at Mashery, we clearly talk about APIs all the time.  While US-based companies make notable moves in the API space, there is a whole world out there beyond our borders.  All over the world, companies are opening up and exposing their data and services to spread their brand for an international audiences. 

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.

Platforms have become a driver of new technologies, businesses and economies. Many in our industry focus on companies looking to enable others to create and deploy on existing foundations. And so a lot of media attention goes to APIs that generate innovation, energy and attention from third party developers in what we call the “App Economy”. Yet, many platforms have been generating revenue with the simple strategy of selling access to their valuable data.

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?