My First Keynote With The Infamous Audrey Watters

by on 06/17/2013

I'm doing a keynote this weekend with the infamous, edtech rabble-rouser Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) at InstructureCon in Park City Utah, this Wednesday June 19th. Audrey and I will be talking about the importance of data portability when it comes to education technology. Instructure, the creators of Canvas, a next generation learning management system (LMS), has been so kind to bring us both out. While Audrey and I spend a lot of time speaking at conferences, this is our first event where we will be both sharing the stage. If you are unaware, Audrey and her Hack Education blog isn't just a partner in crime with API Evangelist when it comes to data portability, she has also played the role of my girlfriend for almost four years. We are both super passionate about open data, open source, data portability, terms of use and privacy policies that protect and empower users.  Because when it comes to education, those "users" are our kids, brothers, sisters, family and friends. Education is not just another Silicon Valley opportunity, it is way too important. I'm stoked to be sharing the stage with Audrey in Park City, UT this Wednesday at InstructureCon.... read more.

Tags: Conference, Hack Education, InstructureCon

Are You Going To Be At API Days in San Francisco? I Am!

by on 06/17/2013

Coming on the heels of API Days Mediterranea in Madrid Spain, is the next event in the series, API Days San Francisco. We kicked off the API Days event series in Paris, at the end of last year, and now after the momentum in Spain, API Days has picked up enough speed to hop the ocean and land in the heart of technology. The lineup is pretty rock'n, with talks from Runscope, SendGrid, Layer 7 Technologies, Netflix, Intel, Apigee, DotCloud, Stripe, Mashape, Mashery, 3Scale, Zapier, APISpark, Singly, Salesforce, SOA Software, Apiary. io, Fitbit, SAP, Mulesoft, Apiphay, Webshell, faberNovel, Reverb and AngelHack. The theme for API Days San Francisco is the API Economy, so it makes sense there are even VC's talking from True Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and even Alex William from Techcrunch will be there. The headliner is ex-Calvin Klein underwear model, media junkie, stimulator of tech influencers and master of spin Mike Maney (@the_spinmd) of Maney Digital. You can count on the event being a good time with the Spin MD, Mike Maney around. API Days San Francisco is shaping up to be a pretty kick ass event. I'd make sure you are there. It is downtown SF, this weekend 6/21 and 6/22 at Parisoma.... read more.

Tags: API Days, Conference, San Francisco

Updated API History White Paper

by on 06/17/2013

Understanding our history is critical to understanding where we are going.  I have been studying the history of web APIs for the last three years. Even though I have been through the API strategies of pioneers like Salesforce and Amazon several times, each time I go back through, I learn more.   In May I went back through the history of APIs and added several stories that I feel are key to introducing people to the API space, as well as helping developers and people who already work with APIs, about why this has all worked. I break the history of APIs into 5 phases: Commerce Social Business & Marketing Cloud Computing Mobile We are standing solidly within the mobile phase of APIs, looking forward at the next phase which is about the Internet of Things. The History of APIs is part of my API 101 series, which I publish to help introduce people to the world of APIs and prepare them for them for the API economy that will surround them. You can download an updated copy of the History of APIs via this blog post, and I will be adding an entirely new white paper section in the near future.... read more.

Tags: API 101, History

History of APIs - Twilio

by on 06/13/2013

In 2007, a new API-as-a-product platform launched, called Twilio, which introduced a voice API allowing developers to make and receive phone calls via any cloud application. Over the last 3 years Twilio has additionally released a text messaging and SMS short code API, making itself a critical telephony resource in many developers toolbox. Twilio is held up as a model platform to follow when evangelizing to developers. Twilio has helped define which technical and business building blocks are essential for a healthy API driven platform, set the bar for on the ground evangelism at events and hackathons, and worked hard to showcase, support and invest it its developer ecosystem. Photo Credit Alongside Foursquare and Instagram, Twilio has come to define mobile application development, helping push APIs into the mainstream. While Twitter has sometime been held up as a cautionary tale when it comes to APIs,  Twilio has demonstrated, that when done right, API driven ecosystems do work. By 2011 the bar for delivering APIs, via HTTP, has been well established by early pioneers like SalesForce and Amazon, but Twilio has shown how mature the business of APIs has become with its evolution into the mobile period.... read more.

Tags: History, SMS, Telephony, Twilio, Voice

API Providers Guide - API Design

by on 06/13/2013

Download as PDF In the early days, APIs were just about deployment and consumption--you were doing one or the other.   Then from 2006 to 2012 API management was introduced from providers like Mashery, then 3Scale and most recently Apiphany. In 2013 the API universe is expanding at a ever increasing pace, and the concept of API design is expanding, with new approaches, tools and even companies stepping up to provide services. I'm deciding to frame my API design research as everything that goes into planning and designing your API, as well as the resulting definition of your API, that will eventually become the  API you will use in production, which also might drive your documentation and generate the code samples your developers will use to integrate their apps. Depending on our needs, API design may begin with learning about HATEOAS as part of your design constraints, or API design might simply be about generating a Swagger definition so you can generate interactive API documentation. Ultimately your API design will be the definition of each endpoint, its methods, fields and much more.... read more.

Tags: API-Design, HATEOAS, Swagger

Box Opens Up Revenue Sharing For API Developers

by on 06/10/2013

Enterprise content sharing platform box launched a new developer revenue sharing program for its API developer ecosystem, called $rev. Box $rev is pretty straightforward. You just integrate the Box API into your app, enroll it into the Box $rev program, and box will monitor, track and report your activity--sending you checks for up to 15% of the per seat price as a commission, each quarter. As a PaaS provider, the core value driven by the box API is not about making money, it is based upon adding new users, and getting them to depend on box for their everyday needs. Offering developers 15% of the revenue generated via the core box platforms makes a lot of sense. This approach to revenue share won't work for all API providers, but is a great way to incentivize developers when you have a core platform you need to drive new users to. I like the Box $rev model, because it actually incentivizes developers to build meaningful, engaging applications that users will actually adopt.... read more.

Tags: Box, Cloud Storage, Content Sharing, Monetization, Pricing, Revenue Share

History of APIs - Mashery

by on 06/10/2013

In November 2006, API the first API service provider Mashery came out of "stealth mode" to offer documentation support, community management and access control for companies wishing to offer public or private APIs--from blog post in TechCrunch titled API Management Service is Open for Business. At this point in time, in 2006, we were moving from the social period of APIs into the cloud computing phase with the introduction of Amazon Web Services. It was clear that the world of web APIs was getting real, and there was opportunity for companies to offer API management as a service. Photo Credit While there were tools for deploying APIs, there was no standard approach to managing your API deployment. Mashery was the first to bring a standard set of services to API providers, that would help set the stage for the future growth of the API industry. It would take almost six more years before the API industry would come of age. The space we all know today was defined by early API commerce pioneers like SalesForce and Amazon, social pioneers like Flickr and Delicous, and from Mashery who helped define what is now known as the business of APIs.... read more.

Tags: API Management, History, Mashery

A Book API Platform

by on 06/10/2013

In the last two years I've seen the emergence of  cloud platforms that focus on helping data administrators, owners and stewards, generate APIs from their data sources. The new cloud services like EmergentOne will mount a MySQL database, spider the tables, and generate a web API for you, while providing you the basic tools you will need to manage access and consumption of that API. In the same spirit of helping data owners generate APIs, I'd like to see the same types of tools, but designed for books and their authors or publishers. When I create a book and generate the ePub version, I would like to be able to upload it to a cloud platform, where the service would spider the ePub file and help generate a simple, but meaningful API for the book allowing developers to search, annotate and interact with the books content via web, mobile or tablet applications. My thoughts are still in the idea stage, I have done very little research on what is out there. But I would envision something like this would work well will existing platforms like Project Gutenberg. As I do with all my ideas, I will share my thoughts here in real-time as I do the research.... read more.

Tags: Books, Epub, Publishing

History of APIs - del.icio.us

by on 06/09/2013

del. icio. us is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks to web pages, that was founded by Jousha Schachter in 2003. Del. icio. us implemented a very simple tagging system which allowed users to easily tag their web bookmarks in a meaningful way, but also established a kind of folksonomy across all users of the platform. Which proved to be a pretty powerful way for cataloging and sharing web links. Photo Credit The innovative tagging methodology used by del. icio. us allowed you to pull a list of your tags, or public web bookmarks by using the URL http://del. icio. us/tag/[tag name]/. So if I was searching for bookmarks on airplanes, I could http://del. icio. us/tag/airplane and I would GET a list of all bookmarks that have been tagged airplane.  It was simple When it came to the programmatic del. icio. us interface, the API was built into the site, creating a seamless experience--if you wanted the airplane tags via HTML you entered http://del. icio. us/tag/airplane, if you wanted RSS of the tags you entered http://del. icio. us/rss/tag/airplane, and if you wanted XML returned you used http://del. icio. us/api/tag/airplane. This has changed with the modern version of Delicious API.... read more.

Tags: del.icio.us, Delicious, History, Yahoo

API Management Using Github

by on 06/08/2013

There are plenty of tools and services you can use to manage your API and its developer community. But there is no platform that provides as much benefit and versatility as Github. Github is a social coding platform that developers have grown to love and respect. With a high level of adoption by developers, and the versatility of the features available on Github, API providers have developed many innovative ways to use the platform to manage an API. I have documented eleven approaches to using Github for API management to date: Design and Code Documentation Software development kits (SDK) Code Samples (Gists) Developer Authentication Developer Profiling Presentations and Guides Issue Management Roadmaps Hackathons Terms of Service, Privacy, and Branding This list does not represent all the uses of Github for an API, but the approaches I've seen used by open API providers. Not all APIs are created or managed equally and these approaches to using Github can be applied in many different ways, even within private platforms. Github is about social coding and file versioning, an approach that offers huge benefits to API management practices.... read more.

Tags: GitHub, Github 101


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next >>