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Mashery “Apps We Like” features applications that are leveraging Mashery customer APIs.   To learn more about these apps and why we like them, visit www.mashery.com/appswelike

To kick off Apps We Like, the following five apps received the official “Apps We Like’ badge:

Super DVD Robot (http://superdvdrobot.com/) – Super DVD Robot provides a way for movie lovers to rate films, list their collections for rating, raving, and community loans, or search for new films, finding titles they want both on and offline.

InstantWatcher.com (http://instantwatcher.com/) – InstantWatcher enables you to search and choose among the streamed movies of the Netflix catalog. Learn more about movies, before or after, with the New York Times extensive movie reviews.

Xobni (http://www.xobni.com/) – Xobni for Outlook is a sidebar tool that provies better email inbox management, plus contact information like previous conversations, social network data, and shared attachments.

Camelbuy (http://camelbuy.com/) – Camelbuy provides price and availability changes on customer-selected products. Notifications are delivered by email, Twitter, and RSS feeds. Also offers price history and trends, and a dashboard of all products selected with product descriptions.

Gracenote (http://www.gracenote.com/) – Gracenote puts artists and fans closer together with richer interactions of cataloged and discoverable music.

Mashery’s “Apps We Like” will be on-going and will add new apps weekly to showcase the real value that Mashery powered APIs deliver.  Come back often to learn more about the apps we like, the developers that build them, and the Mashery managed APIs that they leverage.

API Access Tiers Leverage Digital Assets in Web and Mobile Applications

San Francisco, CA, June 30, 2010—Mashery, the leading provider of API (Application Programming Interface) management and strategic services, today announced new API access tiers, a platform that allows publishing and media companies to provide varying levels of access to their digital assets to internal, partner and third-party developers. API access tiers create a foundation for opening up content to the public or based on established business relationships, providing a viable framework for media companies to monetize online data.

The global publishing industry is facing rapid changes to content delivery models. New devices are being launched every day that allow consumers to get more of their news on the go, and these mobile devices are achieving mainstream adoption much quicker. Just this year, the Apple iPad sold 2 million units in the first 60 days—and Apple reports that a new iPad is sold every three seconds. Media companies need to adapt their content delivery strategies to keep up with constant innovation and early adoption. Managing a reliable, easy-to-use API portal is a cost-efficient solution that allows media companies to take advantage of application development and revenue stream opportunities from the global developer community.

The Guardian newspaper based in the U.K. is using Mashery’s new API access tiers to provide its digital assets to developers and partners through “Open Platform”—the Guardian’s API portal that includes more than 1 million archived articles, picture galleries, podcasts and videos. Partners can access and reuse the Guardian’s content to reach a wider audience, engage users more deeply and produce innovative advertising campaigns. In return, the company can develop new partnerships and expand its reach and its business models through those partnerships. Mashery’s API management service provides the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform necessary to cost-efficiently manage, monitor, monetize and control access to the newspaper’s APIs.

“The ability to provide varying levels of access to our archives is critical in developing a distributed partner model,” said Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian developer network. “We rely on Mashery’s expertise to manage and monitor access rights. As a result, we are able to offer a very robust product that creates new opportunities for us and for our partners.”

Deborah Schultz, Partner Innovation & Design at the Altimeter Group commented, “The early successes and adoption of the iPad, smart phones and other mobile readers are pushing publishers and media companies to think about how they can open up their content to partners and developers to help them expand distribution to these new devices. But access is only part of the story. Media needs to explore new monetization opportunities to leverage this expanding ecosystem”.

Mashery understands that managing APIs is an ongoing process of registering and provisioning new developers while keeping an eye on performance and responding to support requests from the developer community. Any one of these tasks can be time consuming for even just a single partner. When the number of partners grows to dozens, hundreds or thousands of developers, suddenly the job of managing APIs quickly exceeds the bandwidth of most media and publishing companies. In response, Mashery provides a Web-based service that simplifies partner access, monitors API activity for stability and performance and collaborates with and supports developer communities.

“Innovations in mobile technology have fundamentally changed the basic principles of media distribution. Media companies excel at creating content, but most do not have the in-house resources or expertise to keep up with all the new business development opportunities being created through application development and new platforms,” said Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery. “Instead of using resources to try to manage APIs, API access and a variety of partner relationships, publishing and media companies can now focus on what they do best: creating content. Mashery’s API management and strategic services allow them to do just that and with a clear path to revenue creation.”

About Mashery
Mashery’s API management tools and strategic services help companies connect with customers and partners in a changing digital world by extending reach across devices, markets and the Web. Mashery leads the industry with a holistic approach for API initiatives—from setting platform strategy and measuring business objectives to the heavy lifting of providing and managing infrastructure to facilitating relationships with our 50,000-strong network of Web and mobile application developers. Our knowledge, experience and proven strategies enable companies to focus on their core business while driving sales, building new revenue channels and realizing faster time-to-market for innovative applications. Mashery was founded in 2006 and has built an impressive list of clients that include Best Buy, Netflix, and The New York Times. For more information, visit www.mashery.com.

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Coders who work with APIs often have a strong entrepreneurial streak.  Many have tried out just about every monetization model out there for app development. One-time paid subscription. Affiliate. “All-you-can-eat” monthly paid subscription. Advertising. Free-mium. Custom development fees. Just in the last two months, I’ve spotted some new trends in monetizing app development thanks to the help of a couple of smart guys, Steve and Neil. Both have great insights around how platform providers who offer APIs can focus on creating value for developers who build great apps.

Photo credit: WWDC Live Keynote Coverage, gdgt.com

1) Steve the Platform Provider: As shared at WWDC earlier this month, “Why are we doing iAds? For one simple reason: to help developers earn money so they can continue to create free and low-cost apps for users.” Steve recognizes that the deflationary nature of App Stores for mobile application developers has even the largest platform providers looking for alternative revenue models for app builders. The downward pressures on paid-app fees have interesting parallels with the music industry, where downloads are loss leaders for a variety of upsell and marketing opportunities. As confirmed in The Economist, in each case some make it big, but most never become hits. And apart from evergreens, such as games, utilities and programs to use Facebook and Twitter, even the most successful mobile apps often quickly fade into obscurity.

With emerging ad platforms like iAds, AdMob, and Promoted Tweets on the rise, it is clear that platform providers understand that more developers building great apps for customers need a clear path forward for making money. More attention will be given by app developers on how to use advertising (over subscription fees) to monetize their app development. This will have big consequences for the landscape of app development looking forward.

2) Neil the Coder: Neil Mansilla, a successful Web application developer,  gave his own point of view at our unconference API Panel Discussion at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month. Neil shared with our audience that that platform providers offering him marketing opportunities to potential users of his app have turned out to be more valuable than structural differences in revenue share or access fees. When an Apple or Facebook or eBay or Salesforce.com select an app to showcase for their customers, the resulting awareness and downloads/registrations are at a scale developers generally never could have afforded on their own.

So, Steve signaled that advertising is positioned to play an increasingly important role for app monetization for developers, implicitly acknowledging the downward pricing pressures on paid apps. Then, Neil gave me a lesson in the value of app marketing to app developers, sharing that in many cases the most valuable offer that platform providers can extend to developers is actively promoting the best quality apps to their customer base.

Savvy app developers out there are quickly going to get a lot more comfortable with the role that marketing and advertising has in the overall value of their app development projects. Savvy Web and mobile platform providers with APIs should pay close attention.

- Delyn

We Media ran a great interview article with our CEO Oren Michels. Here’s the QA with Oren about how APIs are driving new digital businesses:

What kinds of companies – or which companies in particular – are doing the best at “exploding” their content and expanding their business through massive distribution of information via APIs?

When done right, the API should be a new or expanded distribution channel that extends your existing business model. If you are an e-commerce company, your API should result in more sales. If you are an ad-supported media company, it should drive more traffic or ad revenue. If you get your revenue from subscriptions, you should increase subscribers or decrease churn. If you sell data or data services, you should sell more data by enabling your customers to embed it in their app or service. We have great examples in each of these – Best Buy and etsy in retail, the NY Times and the Guardian in media, Hoovers and Open Calais with data, and Netflix with subscriptions. There are lots of others.

Which have struggled, and what are the key difference you’ve observed between the winners who “get it” and losers who don’t?

We worked with one media company that really wanted to make its content available by API, but unfortunately could not secure the rights to do so. Their API therefore lacked sufficient usefulness to spark developer adoption, and they eventually discontinued it.

The key things that differentiate winners are:

1. GREAT developer communication (documentation, forums, etc)

2. Instant developer provisioning – you need to be able to register for and access the API, at least in a sandbox or development version, immediately. Developers have a tendency to show up at 3 am wanting instant gratification – they want to know then and there if the API will meet their needs or solve their problems.

3. Lots of sample apps available. The reason that we saw so many google map mashups a few years ago were that there were a few great examples that got a bunch of attention, and pretty soon it snowballed.

4. Developer-friendly terms and conditions. If you tell a developer that they can’t make money using the API, they won’t waste their time using it. Remember, you’re building an ecosystem, and for an ecosystem to work you need mutual benefit.

5. Open EVERYTHING. The more flexible the building blocks, the more creative the developers can be and the more innovation will happen. If you only have 2×4 red legos, your projects will be pretty boring. Our advice is “open everything unless you have a very compelling reason to keep something closed – don’t keep things closed unless you can come up with a compelling reason to open it”

6. Don’t be afraid of cannibalism. As the saying goes, if you’re not willing to eat your young, someone someone else will eat them for you. It’s hard to have your API extend your business model if you prohibit your partners from also using the very business model you’re already succeeding at.

7. Good developer outreach, evangelism and support – like any community, people want to be part of something active and vibrant

8. A healthy mix of API use by internal developers, large partners who you work with directly, and independent developers who interact primarily through the developer site and ecosystem

9. Fair treatment of developers – you may have to change the rules, but the more frequently you do it, the less likely you are to have a happy, healthy developer community

10. Uptime and reliability – I list this last, since twitter has certainly proven you can build a massive developer ecosystem with modest success at uptime and reliability

News companies such as The New York Times, NPR and Guardian have set up APIs to expand distribution and use of their content. What do you think of their efforts – and how might they do more/better?

I’m a big fan of all three, two of whom (NYT and Guardian) are customers. News companies face a challenge on how to monetize content that is syndicated, and are understandably reluctant to provide full-content APIs until they are comfortable that they have found the right business model to do so. NPR has a bit of an advantage there, as a member and community supported nonprofit. But the conversations I’ve had with numerous news organizations – both our customers and our prospects – make me optimistic that they will figure out a model that makes gathering, editing, curating and distributing great news a profitable, sustainable business. It may look a bit different than it does now, but it’s not going away.

Paid news content, iPad: What are your predictions?

I was very optimistic about both based on the demo Chris Anderson of Wired did at TED last weekt. I haven’t bought a kindle primarily because I enjoy news magazines, photojournalism, and great design (whereas my wife, who is more into books than news, loves her kindle). Chris’s demo of the wired prototype on the iPad made me believe that I may be able to ditch the sack of printed magazines I bring on long flights, and in general go to a smaller, lighter bag for travel. I’ll happily pay for that – it is, absolutely, an improvement on what we have today. Of course the devil is in the details. If I need to pay more for the electronic version of a magazine than I pay for the dead tree version, that might be a problem.

This is different, though, than getting us to pay for the website version of news that we currently get for free. There’s no improvement there. For instance, I’m typing this on an 8 hour flight from Europe to the US. No way that the paywall version of a news site would have any value for me – heck, even if I preload pages, I have to remember to download the “single page” version or I can only read the beginning of a story. Good content, available in a great format that can be enjoyed offline, at a reasonable price will do just fine.

Like this interview? It’s just a taste of Oren’s insights. Join him at We Media Miami, an annual innovation conference March 9-11 in Miami (register here). Joining Oren will be Krista Thomas, head of marketing and communication for OpenCalais, a semantic web and content tagging service from Thomson Reuters.

The post was authored by We Media co-founder Andrew Nachison and I’d like to point out that telling the Mashery / API story ain’t easy so I applaud this great intro -

Mashery manages APIs – the software “secret sauce” that helps media companies, retailers, Twitter, Google and others distribute their content throughout the digital universe.

The most famous API-du-jour is the Twitter API. That’s the set of instructions and programming code that has enabled legions of independent developers, from companies with names like Tweetie, Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck, to create apps and services based on the database of status updates, timestamps, account photos and geo-locations posted to Twitter.

The Best Buy Remix API, maintained by Mashery, allows review sites and anyone else to incorporate product information and links to make purchases at BestBuy.com. APIs encourage mashups and wide distribution of content into the atomized universe of digital experiences across a multitude of brands. They fly in the face of traditional media business models built around monolithic branded, packaged, “build-it-and-they-will-come” content products – like web sites.

APIs are all about explosive, viral distribution and use of content anywhere – and building businesses around that use.

[so what this is re-posted a little backwards, we like to think outside the box here at Mashery... ]