platform

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com.

A couple of weeks ago, Adria Richards (West Coast Developer Evangelist with our friends at SendGrid) hosted Girl Develop Its’ “How to Rock Your First Hackathon”.

She went through some of the key resources anyone should have ready (not just the ladies) for your first hackathon:

Learn To Code Resources

An interesting infographic came out this month on the trajectory of iOS devices in today’s higher education institutions. The Australian think tank Open Colleges culled the core set of global data available on how far up the ivory towers we now find Apple fan boys, fanatics and fellows.

As you're packing for this week's Shop.org Annual Summit, it's useful to keep in mind how digitizing the retail experience for your business's consumers via APIs can really make your business stand out as an innovative and more influential player in the retail space. To help keep things in perspective before the show, we'll use Best Buy as a case-in-point example for how a traditionally brick-and-mortar store transformed its business model into one that has proven great success in this post-website era.

THE PROBLEM

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.

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.

Less than a decade ago, we were limited to accessing the Internet via a monitor, keyboard and speakers overtaking our desks. Today, we view and engage with connected content by virtually every kind of device in our lives: our smartphones, tablets, television sets, even alarm clocks. At the heart of this ‘magic’ are the same engines that power our apps and websites of today: APIs.

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.

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 aren’t many issues left that we can see in terms of black and white. Everything has nuance—there are shades and complexities, levels of acceptance, and so on.

Here’s an exception. If you handle credit card data, your product or service is either PCI-compliant, or it’s not. Period.

I know this isn’t a fun topic. You want to focus on launching a commerce API but instead you spend time on figuring out how to comply with a long list of confusing rules. It’s a hassle and an obstacle. But it’s also vital.

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.

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

As a matter of practice at Mashery, we regularly poll developers about their pain points in order to learn which resources help best address the points they identify. We advise clients to make it a habit to actively listen to developers -- both inside and outside their company -- if they want to design an API that developers will use. Listening can take the form of monitoring Twitter, Quora, and Stack Overflow, setting the right Google alerts, but if you prioritize correctly, you should also schedule opportunities to listen to developers in person.