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2013 looks like it’s going to be a good year for APIs. Beyond Google, Facebook and Twitter, companies in the travel industry are beginning to recognize the benefits of conducting business via APIs.

Last week, Room 77, a hotel booking startup, provided yet more proof that API-based collaboration can generate massive and mutually beneficial ROIs.

While many of our New Year’s resolutions center around things like losing weight or finally organizing the garage - think about starting the New Year by cleaning out your digital clutter.

When it comes to social media, we create our own experience to a certain extent. We choose who we want to follow or add to our network and how we connect.  However, after years of adding acquaintances, old co-workers or potential business contacts, we may find our contact lists become bloated.

(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.

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.

One morning in April 2001, scores of tech workers pondered the arrival of dozens of black penguins spray-painted on street corners from San Francisco’s SoMa district to the Haight Ashbury. Beside each stenciled penguin was a peace sign and a heart. It quickly emerged that these new arrivals were in fact IBM’s attempt to engage the open source software community with clip art linked to the birth of Linux and the Grateful Dead.