Mashery Blog

We're pleased to announce Radian6 as the newest addition to the list of Mashery customers.

"Mashery setup and support was very easy and straightforward. They provided us with all the help and support we required to get our API portal up and running, including a custom step-by-step checklist to get us setup just the way we wanted." said Radian6's Mike Mullen, "I'm very impressed with our on-boarding and excited to continue to reap the many benefits of the Mashery platform."

About Radian6:

I’ve heard that developers build software for either money or fame. But sometimes, there’s a nobler cause. Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services and Vice President Biden announced a nationwide challenge to develop apps that can help prevent dating violence and sexual assault for young adults and college students. The prize amount at stake? Zero. Did that keep developers from participating? Absolutely not.
 

Vertically focused hackathon events are the most challenging for developers. They must often abandon their comfort zone of project ideas and APIs they're familiar with to build something compelling and useful within the constraints of the contest theme. Themed hackathons are wonderful at extending a developer's skill set and expanding his or her creative horizons. Video Hackday SF did just that for over 40 developers, who collectively built 13 video apps that day.

The Story

A room that says "Let your ideas fly" - loud and clear on one of the walls is probably a perfect setting to get some rockstar developers together, help them unleash their creativity and then sit back and see the magic unfurl. That is precisely what happened at Hollywood Hackday in Los Angeles early November.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the beautiful city of Bloomington, Indiana, representing Mashery at The Combine Conference & API Hackday. If you haven't heard of API Hackday - it's an event that brings developers together for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps with APIs. Developers of all experience levels can share ideas, collaborate on projects, start new ventures and discover great tools and new APIs to play with.

During the past two years of participating and hosting hackathons across the country, I've formulated some internal generalizations about developer communities, mostly comparing Silicon Valley with various other cities. However, after co-hosting back-to-back hack events in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, I stumbled upon interesting unique characteristics within each city's dev communities that paint a deeper picture.

Today, we are announcing the Mashery API Explorer, a new, free way for developers to discover and test APIs from dozens of companies including USA TODAY, Yellow Pages Group, Hotwire, Edmunds.com, and Klout.

Over the weekend of November 5th, American Express OPEN Forum hosted a best-in-class Hackathon in NY. It showcased that innovation and creativity can be put into action and actually ‘ship’. Not to mention, in only 24 hours time. To put it simply, I was blown away. After seeing the teams form organically on day one, to witnessing the rapid-fire elevator pitches and demos on day two, I realized the world of development has entered a new chapter. We are now in a Mashup culture, where the ingredients to your software are open APIs, and your imagination is the real-time blueprint.

AmEx's OPEN Forum provides small business owners a best-in-class platform to connect and collaborate.   Bringing together a variety of tools, exclusive articles, videos, and industry insights, OPEN Forum is invaluable when improving your business and keeping pace with the industry. Recognizing the value of this rich content, OPEN Forum has produced its first public APIs in partnership with Mashery.

Having lived in the DC-Metro area for the past several years, it's always great to be back there. Last weekend, on my way back to New York from Richmond, I stopped over to visit family for the weekend and thought it would be fun to attend the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon at the AOL office in Dulles, VA with some friends.

At Mashery, addressing and solving developer pain related to integrating across multiple APIs is one of the primary goals of our Mashery API Network and our open data commons of over 50+ RESTful APIs.

Steve Yegge's now famous rant about Google+ is actually an incredibly educational piece about the competitive advantages of API-enabled platforms. Yegge's thesis? That platforms are the new drivers of business value. If you're thinking about building an API -- or not building one -- Yegge is required reading.

With APIs becoming more and more important for companies' core businesses, we've been getting lots of requests for sharing Mashery API analytics with colleagues -- including those who aren't on the API team. Those colleagues can include marketers who want to tell the story of apps and partnerships powered by the API, business analysts who want to evaluate API investments, and execs looking to understand how your API drives value. 

Mashery recently co-hosted hackathons in two cities with emerging Web tech communities -- Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. One city, famous for its roots in gambling and entertainment. The other, established around Temple Square and majestic mountains. Two seemingly divergent origins and cultures that have something very much in common - energetic developers with wonderful skills. Between the two events came a deluge of original hacks created in a single day.

I had a great experience at the NYC Foursquare Hackathon held September 17-18th, and  wanted to share some highlights of the impressive event.