Mashery Blog

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

There's something about college life. You want to do something exciting and you have relatively little fear of failure/criticism or similar apprehensions that keep us from doing what we know we should. You just dive in and figure it out. For collegiate developers for instance, I feel Hackathons, fit just the bill for that kind of spirit.

Several months ago when I was working on a Foursquare notification tool, I was made aware of a security issue with using SSL through cURL. API calls to Foursquare require SSL, which a good idea for many API-driven applications.

This past Wednesday, Mashery (along with SendGrid, DocuSign and others) sponsored the very first Twilio Conference at the lovely Bently Reserve in downtown San Francisco, CA, just a few blocks from our Mashery headquarters, and Neil and I had the opportunity to attend.

At Mashery, nothing gets us more excited than when our customers do cool stuff with their APIs. Case in point: the new Logitech Harmony Link, with program info supplied by Rovi's Mashery-powered API.

Just a couple of months ago, Edmunds was hosting its own internal hack days  with the intent of creating greater API awareness and empower the developer community to create innovative and useful automotive-related experiences with the Edmunds data.

Last weekend, Mashery had the honor of sponsoring and attending API Hackday ATX, an API-centric hackathon located near downtown Austin, Texas.

Mashery sponsored and presented at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF hackathon held two days before the main conference. Over 500 developers converged on the San Francisco Design Center Concourse for 24 hours of intense and creative hacking, competing for cash, investment capital (up to $500K), mountains of high-tech loot, but most of all, for glory.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Hackday.tv in NYC - a 24-hour hackathon showcasing innovation and creativity in the world of video. The experience was truly amazing. Some great video apps got built inside 24 hours.

It truly reflected the passion and enthusiasm of the developer community in NYC. A total of 60 developers hacked all weekend to produce 20 awesome video apps.

Here at Mashery, we are all about encouraging and promoting innovation. We're particularly enthusiastic about open APIs, and at the moment, we're excited to congratulate David Mytton for launching the Server Density API program.

The Refrigerator Slide

Looking to build a nimble, secure platform for extending commerce to all consumer touch points? Join Mashery for our upcoming webinar, "Put Your Buy Button Anywhere," on Thursday, September 15, 2011, at 11:00 am (US Pacific Time).

Now that the buzz of eTail 2011 in Boston is starting to calm down, retailers are faced with the very real question of how to make many of the ideas discussed at the conference a reality. Many sessions were held discussing the need to effectively execute on Multi-Channel and Mobile. Well, how does a company really get started on those things? Do you go to your development manager and say we need a mobile app or a better way to support affiliates? You could, but that leads you into the land of one-off solutions, which have long development cycles and limited flexibility.

Citi ThankYou Rewards recently launched a mobile application that enables users to buy Best Buy products in-store by using their rewards points.

As customers shop in a Best Buy retail store, they can scan the barcodes of the merchandise they want to purchase and the app will display how many points are needed for each item. Then,  if the customer decide to purchase the product, they can add the product to a virtual cart and a confirmation email will be sent to customer's email account, directing them to the in-store pickup counter at Best Buy to get their merchandise.

When Kirsten, Clay, Scott and I started Mashery over five years ago, there was no such thing as a service for API management. Defining the initial product was easy, because we craved API management at our previous company (which was why we started Mashery), and we knew what we wanted.

But pricing was another story. We had no idea how to do it.