Mashery Blog

NYTimes recently wrote an article about information bottleneck with regards to FOIA request response. While I agree with many of their argument of agencies not being efficient or consistent across different entities, I could not help but thinking why am I getting many government data through NYTimes APIs.

Happy to learn about the Vatican's new social media-connected portal -- and that Pope Benedict XVI himself may be clicking the go-live button next week. Papal updates will forever after be followable on Facebook and Twitter.

But what about a Papal API? Communion over mobile phones, confessions via iChat. Really, the possibilities are endless

We can see it now: http://api.vatican.va/getBlessing

Remember how in episodes of Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise (choose your favorite), would always know the location of brave crew members daring to go down to the unknown planet to meet the strange, odd and exotic.  Essentially, these crew members were sending "Push Notifications" of their whereabouts and "Checking In" to their location. Flipping to reality, we are all letting our personal crew know of our location thanks to geo-location apps such as FourSquare.

Google Chrome will soon have voice and video chat functionality built right in, removing the need for third-party plugins. By exposing WebRTC (the open project Google grabbed in its 2010 GIPS acquisition) through JavaScript APIs, Google will let any developer build real-time communications in Chrome.

The news from Flurry that people are spending more minutes on mobile apps than on web surfing has big implications for online brands and APIs.

Ever see something on the web or an application on your phone and say ‘hey, I like that’? We at Mashery see many different useful apps, over 25,000 of them, leveraging our customer APIs in a variety of ways. There are so many in this wide world of apps that we’ve decided to showcase and share some of the ones that are doing something interesting and designate them as a Mashery ‘Apps We Like’. Take a peek at a few of these apps and see why we like them.

The list of companies which are leveraging APIs is growing at a fast and steady pace. Data that leverages everything from retail product information to the latest movie showtimes, are available via APIs - many running through Mashery's infrastructure.

This month, Mashery introduced a new event series, The Evolution of Distribution. These events present API thought leaders, from a variety of industries, to talk about how APIs have become an integral part of their overall business strategy.

As featured in the New York Times yesterday, Cohuman has made some big mobile moves recently. Cohuman credits their API they launched in early March for helping them get mobile faster - and mobile solutions is the one thing that their customers clamor for most.

The thing we love most at Mashery is seeing our customers extend their brands in incredible new ways through their APIs. So you can imagine how thrilled we are about today's announcements from Yellow Pages Group and Foursquare.

With all of the flair that only Apple could bring, they have announced "iCloud". A place where one can store and stream their photos, music, email, calendar and more without the worries of ever being out of sync. What's makes this new Apple product so interesting is that it has officially brought the notion of "The Cloud" to the mainstream consumer. In a way, it's "iRonic" that this announcement comes at a time when essentially we've all been living in "The Cloud" for years now, it just took Apple to bring it to our attention.

Think about it:

Do you Facebook? You Cloud.

It’s always a good day at Mashery when we see a customer go live with a new API. Fortunately, that means a lot of good days around our offices. One of the most recent launches….Expedia Affiliate Network’s new Hotel API.
The updated API (version 3) is 30% faster and can accommodate 88% more request types. Plus, its restructured schema is more logical and contains lighter responses for mobile friendliness. In fact, one of the most successful travel apps on the market, Expedia’s hotel booking app, was built and initially launched using EAN’s version 3 hotel API.

This week Google announced their "Google Wallet", a one tap, one app solution for making purchases with your Android OS NFC-enabled mobile phone. This is not a commerce website shrunk down to phone size (we certainly have plenty of those). This is turning your cell phone into a Fastrak (E-ZPass for east coasters) for any purchases, anywhere. While currently only being tested in the field, the expectation is that it will launch some time in the summer.

Before you write your service provider a check – me, my competition, anybody – you have to ask them, “How are you going to accelerate my success?” The answer I think you want to look for is about execution. Simple, fast execution.

It doesn’t have to be about doing a lot of things. When I was at Salesforce.com, we had competition from Siebel and MSCRM. They had us on features, hundreds of them. They had us on size, they were multiple times as big as us. We just said “we are easy to use, easy to implement and easy to administer and the browser based app runs fast."

The infamous AWS outage of April 2011 is not even a week behind us and already many debate which has disturbed the ripples of the internet waves more, the actual event or the ensuing rhetoric. Before the dust settles, I suppose, it is my turn to weigh in.

A tremendous amount has been written about ‘who was wrong’ or ‘who is bad’’- Amazon or its customers. Like many things in life- the answer is not quite that binary. Amazon- and cloud services in general- are good for some things and bad for others. Amazon is not meant to be all things to all people. Many have asked me- as an Amazon customer- how we plan to react. We’re not going to "dump Amazon" or "dump the cloud" because they had some downtime any more than we would have stopped using data centers when 365 main lost power, or Rackspace went down after a truck hit a power pole outside of their facility.