Mashery Blog

If you want to see how far we’ve come in the business of technology—and sadly, how far we still have to go—then look no further than the simple RFP. Yes, the Request for Proposal that’s at the core of getting new business.

It’s a staple of every industry, and plenty of good people make a living creating and answering these. But in the world of software as a service, especially when at its core there’s something as new as an API strategy, the RFP is obsolete. It’s a fossil. It’s a dinosaur. And it should be just as extinct.

As the mobile payment market has been heating up in the past few months with more and more new entrants (RevCoin launched its mobile payment system at the beginning of June), it is important to ask, what will be the distinguishing feature among all these systems? It is easy to think about the cost to use each system as that distinguishing feature – and there has been a bit of a price war going on between some of the players in the mobile payment space. New and old mobile payment services are trying to lower prices to get more traction.

Maybe we don’t mind ‘.com’ and ‘.org’ because it’s all we’ve ever known. But isn’t that entry point to the online world ridiculously small?

It’s easy to say the Internet is big, but the numbers are still staggering. There are now 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. (No, that’s not a typo.) And yet the only way to get to almost any of them is a tiny number of suffixes: .com, .biz, etc. This is one area that’s ripe for change, and that’s finally happening.

Swiping a card or entering a credit card number whenever you want to make a purchase can get tiresome. Fortunately, we will have to do these actions less and less. Digital wallets will free us from carrying physical wallets and entering credit card numbers online just like credit cards freed us from having to always carry cash. And mobile payment systems like Square, Intuit and PayAnywhere are making it easier to pay digitally everywhere.

Call it evolution, or maybe schizophrenia: Two unrelated stories in the news this week highlight what’s happening in the retail industry right now (and how a few good applications might help).

Here at Mashery, we admire the trendsetting that our customers bring to their markets. This year, creating APIs as products is one of the ways we see customers pushing the envelope in their markets. APIs as products help companies scale across new channels at rapid speeds because they simplify how developers discover, use and compensate companies for their products via APIs.

Have you checked out Mashery's Apps We Like? Each week we will be featuring 2 new amazing applications built on the powerful APIs of Mashery customers.

App of the Day: ShopWise Canada

Powered by the Yellow Pages Group API, ShopWise Canada uses your location to find the hottest deals and all the daily deals around you. With daily deal sites and app as one of the new "in" thing, we're sure you don't want to miss out on ShopWise.

Here at Mashery, it’s not just that we power APIs – it's that we love helping customers use elegant and powerful APIs that drive real business value from digital platforms. We help our customers develop best-of-breed API strategies and empower them with tools to manage and support their use. In short, we power some of the best APIs around. Internal and external. Enterprise and mid-market. Cloud and local. We do it all.

Have you checked out Mashery's Apps We Like? Each week we will be featuring 2 new amazing applications built on the powerful APIs of Mashery customers.

App of the Day: Qup.tv

Last week at the Conversational Marketing Summit in New York, Amy Chang of Google Analytics stated, “data and marketing are finally getting married”.  Many of the presenters, though not as blunt, seemed to agree with Ms. Chang.

It was 10am on a bright NY morning.  Joggers, cyclists, and brunch goers were out and about, and here I was inside a hanger-like pier on the Westside of Manhattan. This would be my first Hackathon. 24 hours to build a music app.  This was my goal. To create a simple location-based app that polled free and accessible data. 

Federal CTO Todd Park and CIO Steven VanRoekel announced at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week the government's initiative to open up data to developers to help drive innovation of new applications and services based on that data.

As a matter of practice at Mashery, we regularly poll developers about their pain points in order to learn which resources help best address the points they identify. We advise clients to make it a habit to actively listen to developers -- both inside and outside their company -- if they want to design an API that developers will use. Listening can take the form of monitoring Twitter, Quora, and Stack Overflow, setting the right Google alerts, but if you prioritize correctly, you should also schedule opportunities to listen to developers in person.

We had a great time hosting Social Media Club's "Social Media + APIs" panel at our offices last week. The panel included spokespeople from Klout, Whit.li, Involver and ViralHeat.

Check out the great write up on the Social Media Club blog.

Now that spring is here and we’ve stowed our winter coats, thoughts turn to plans to getting away for the holiday weekend or a summer camping trip. But if you’re like us here at Mashery, you may have a whole different trip and camp in mind. Now, we like a three-day weekend as much as anyone else, but today the excitement around Mashery HQ is focused on two great events we’re headed to this week: CloudCamp Denver and Gluecon.