Mashery Blog

The technology community and cloud enthusiasts were reminded over the weekend—once again—that you need to architect your technology for fail if you’re going to use a cloud hosting provider like Amazon. While there are days when AWS feels like magic to me, every system has its bad moments, and Sunday was AWS EU's turn. 

There seems to be an app for just about everything for everyone.  At Mashery, we look for interesting apps that are leveraging API in very unique ways and feature them as ‘Apps We Like’.  Take a peek at a few of these apps and see why we like them.

Portland is the place to be this week! You can catch Neil, Uriah and Delyn from Mashery at OSCON, API Hackday Portland, and PDX API Hour -- locations and details below.

Klout, the analytics company that measures users' influences across social networks, appears ready to enter, what John Musser of ProgrammableWeb has coined the API Billionaires Club. Processing about one billion API calls per month (serving more than two billion API calls in only June) across its 3,000 partner partner-developers, Klout has clearly blown the waters with its rapid growth in just a few months.

PayPal Announces Phone-To-Phone NFC Widget for Android Phones

At the MobileBeat conference, PayPal announced its NFC software widget for Android phones, which would let consumers make payments to one another by tapping two NFC-equipped phones together.

Last week, we began our Developer Metrics series of exploring the top three most commonly reported developer metrics. We kicked off the series of getting at the value of measuring bigger versus better with different ways of reporting on Total number of Developers who are consuming your API.

South Korea, the home of leading tech companies such as Samsung and LG, announced a plan for its schools to go paperless by 2015. The government plans on spending $2 billion to develop digital text books, which would be available on a student's school-supplied tablet - most likely a Galaxy or Optimus. Students will also access paperless materials through a cloud–based system. With the cloud in place, sick students, or those who live in mountainous areas , will be able to access materials from home. 

Mashery customer Springer, a leading global publisher of scientific books and journals, recently announced the winners of its first Springer API Challenge -- a competition for original, non-commercial applications using Springer metadata and content APIs. The competition's goal was to offer users new ways to find, visualize, and/or manipulate relevant data drawn from Springer's large and growing content base.

Great piece by Chrys Wu on Poynter.org, the site for journalists, about how reporters and news organizations can use APIs:

Beginner’s guide for journalists who want to understand API documentation

Sharing developer metrics is a great way to represent success and activity around your API. Many popular API platforms measure and announce their developer metrics regularly. Twitter announced yesterday it now serves 750K developers who have built 1M applications with their API. PayPal talked about its 1.5K apps and 60K PayPal X platform developers last month. Foursquare just last week shared that its API has grown to more than 10K registered developers.

Reported numbers from successful API platforms are a useful yardstick. Don't let them distract you from measuring the unique value of your own API. By their nature, reported numbers tend to be the variety that naturally chart up and to the right -- even better when they are more so than your competition. Sometimes concentrating on "getting bigger" every month can disguise important trends and value. By measuring developer metrics for your own API, your product, engineering teams and your company executives will be able to focus on where value-seeking developers are succeeding and contributing to your business.

In this series, we'll break down the top three most commonly reported developer metrics to get at the value of bigger versus better. Remember, companies may opt to report 'bigger' for various reasons, but it may be even more important in the long run to actively measure and monitor 'better'.

APIs are all about distribution. But what if your distribution partners don't have the time or expertise to deal with JSON or XML?

Lately, we're seeing a growing number of Mashery customers solve this problem with widgets. In particular, they're building tools for configuring API-powered widgets that keep the technical stuff tucked under the hood. Widgets are nothing new, of course, but more and more API providers are using them to broaden their reach among non-technical publishers and affiliates.

This past weekend Mashery customer Alibris announced its  First Annual API Programming Contest winners.  

Few months ago, I was sitting at the Entrepreneurship class in business school and one student came up with this idea of creating a smartphone app that will help patients in remote area to send their photo for mobile doctor consultation.

Few weeks ago, I found this startup called “Social27”, which enables companies to host virtual events such as conferences and trade shows. 

We've been hearing from developers for a while now that they are looking for a single-sign on experience at developer.mashery.com where they can login once with their Mashery ID, then access all of their keys, applications and API usage reports across the Mashery API Network in one central place.

When you share suggestions, we listen and do our best to respond. Check out our new Developer Dashboard by signing in at developer.mashery.com to view how you can now manage and view activity from any API you have accessed with your Mashery ID at a glance.

If you are looking to discover new useful APIs and data sources to add to your dashboard, head on over to Mashery's open data commons of RESTful APIs — all APIs listed are accessible by signing on with your Mashery ID. You can also explore our applications directory, showcasing the best and most interesting apps built by developers in the Mashery API Network, or our Mashery API status monitor, revealing real-time performance and health monitoring of API services across the Mashery API Network. This information helps developers throughout the lifecycle of their application development and deployment.

We <3 feedback from developers. Give us some @mashery so we know what you like and how you think we can do better.