Yesterday was arguably one of the best SFNewTech. Congrats for the 4th anniversary, Myles! Zuumer is certainly an excellent new way of transportation and I’ll try to get one as long as the price comes down a bit. But the tool I used immediately was Apture. I found Apture a great tool for any content and media site that wants to retain users on their site. Simply add a JavaScript line and done. It couldn’t be simpler. Great job, guys! While you are reading my blog – check it out.
First of all I have to say that Austin is a lovely city. I was very positively surprised… and imagine – not everybody has a Bluetooth headset, talking to an iPhone and a Mac on his laps – must be that I’ve been to the Bay Area for too long already. Live music on the street, in the airport, in almost every bar around town. Nice stuff.
SXSW is a huge event that draws a major crowd – mainly from the US, but also with growing participation from some European countries – mainly Germany the UK and France, hosts three parallel events SXSW Music, Film and Interactive.
Although I found many talks and sessions a bit mainstream, the crowd, the atmosphere, the geeks, the parties made it a very worthwhile event. The best contacts I actually got from the nightly events, aka parties – numerous of them every night, with a cool and relaxed crowd covering a wide range of the industry.
Open (Web) APIs
Not surprisingly, APIs are on the rise. In most talks they were a core topic, the expo was full of them and several companies organized extra shows like Mashery’sCircus Mashimus or Alcatel Lucent’sEleven API. APIs are certainly mainstream now, at least in the US, while many Internet businesses begin to receive the first positive returns from their investments. However, many of them are still at the beginning of exploiting their value. While companies have opened access to their original services, content and functionality (good!), it is absolutely crucial to manage APIs correctly. Nobody would ever think about not securing their systems against regular HTTP access misuse. The whole Internet industry by now is focused on HTML websites as a distribution channel and revenue stream. I predict that by SXSW 2011, we’ll have a similar understanding for APIs as well. Manage your API correctly, secure and manager its access, monitor and analyze its usage and monetize the traffic! Watch this interview about the API industry here with Laura Merling from Alcatel Lucent, Sam Ramji & Greg Brail from Sonoa Systems as well as Martin Tantow, co-founder of 3scale.
Apart from enabling location integration on their site a few days ago, Twitter launched a new subdomain, sxsw.twitter.com where you can track Twitter employees around town. Nice idea. This should be white label so that other companies could use it for their own purposes. But the biggest surprise (at least for me) was that Twitter is finally going monetization and launched @Anywhere, Twitter’s new advertizing platform. This makes lots of sense. Although details about @Anywhere are yet to follow – think Google, think their ad revenue stream, and think back Twitter and their growing relevance in crowdsourced content. You got it. Twitter has gathered a who-is-who of the industry, namely Amazon.com, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Bing, Citysearch, The New York Times, eBay and several others as their initial partners. Although this is not the maximum version of an ad network on Twitter itself, it shows the further revenue streams for the company. Twitter API monetization anyone?
What am I gonna do differently next year? I’ll stay for the Music event as well. Awesome show, Austin!
Below find some thought leadership on Online Marketing: “Maximize your ROI by Converting Web Traffic into Sales”.
I know there is lots of knowledge and material around this topic. This presentation is bringing some structure to a wide spread problem of all Internet businesses. I am splitting up the problem into: Be Seen, Be Found, Capture & Engage, Convert and Analyze.
Online / Web Marketing is the most exciting research subject on Marketing currently. Please feel free to comment, criticize, add, discuss, etc. Thanks for reading!
The online media industry is feeling increased pressure to monetize their content on the web. The current battle between Rupert Murdoch and Google is just one example within this game which will put on weight over the next months. Especially newspapers are seeing their offline revenues dwindling and increased online competition – often without a sustainable concept or strategy for a turn around. Marc Andreessen even suggests to shut down the print edition right now and become a pure internet player. Or you see it like Joseph Schumpeter and call it “creative destruction”. In any case, and as most of online media, the newspaper industry has to reinvent itself.
So far the bad news for media companies. The good news is that new technology provides new resources of revenues and distribution channels. Many media companies have launched APIs (application programming interfaces) recently. APIs basically allow the distribution of content & services to other businesses. As some call it “Bus Dev 2.0”, this new distribution channel introduces an additional revenue opportunity:
Indirectly: additional traffic is generated through the API which increases revenues through traditional business models, or
Directly, when the online businesses charges for the access to the API.
Both business models are certainly valid and make sense. Here is a list of role models, online media (and other) companies who are successfully utilizing the API technology to generate revenues:
NPR
Launched in July 2007, NPR’s API is the first major media API that opens up original news and other information for online re-use by other parties.
In the words of Todd Mundt, this creates “Unprecedented flexibility [that] allows anyone, from a blogger in Pittsburgh to KQED in San Francisco, to generate highly specific content searches of the NPR archive (going back to 1995) and port the results to a webpage or an application.”
Beyond exposing the information to over 250,000 produced stories on public radio stations, the NPR API provides lessons learned on particular technical and business challenges and also helps pave the way to a more collaborative and open dialogue with media producers and the public moving forward. It helps to demonstrate that intellectual property rights and mashups do not need to be mutually exclusive. Instead of building legal barriers around the content, there is an alternate opportunity that media producers can embrace: the utilization of APIs as a distribution channel.
The New York Times The New York Times Developer Network launched the first API in public beta in October 2008. Since then, the media company has launched a set of internal and external APIs, allowing other programs or websites to access its data and services.
It all started with an APIs for article search – users can search for more than 2.8 millions articles since 1981 such as movie reviews, recipes or congressional votes. The roadmap for 2010 includes events, weddings, news feeds and bestsellers.
The New York Times is a pioneer for this technology and many others are copying their model. Hundreds of mashups have been created, including complex visualizations of the origin of Barack Obama’s Campaign finance. The system is expected to increase activity drastically in the future – eventually bringing over 2.5 times more viewers to their content than the NYTimes.com website itself.
Expect this to be huge. As soon as the big media companies realize the potential of distributing their content via APIs they will all want to engage. The necessary infrastructure from companies like 3scale is available to make this happen.
We have improved the 3scale support portal recently. This includes new documentation, videos, a forum, integration with GetSatisfaction, etc. The support portal will make it much easier for customers to integrate our API management solution and understand which steps are necessary. Watch videos on YouTube and Viddler.
Thank you, dear hacker! I just arrived at my San Diego hotel room for a few days off last week, checking e-mails before going to bed, and found several e-mails and Twitter direct messages back from friends asking me what’s wrong with me. It took me a while to realize what has happened: my Twitter account had been hacked. The hacker has sent hundreds of direct messages to all my followers, trying to convince them to click on some bullshit URL. The damage was immense. While posting a message on Twitter about what has happended, changing the Twitter password, trying to de-link applications that I granted access to Twitter, I was kept busy replying to angry followers announcing to de-follow me. But the damage was already done.
There seems to be a serious security issue at Twitter. I am a bit surprised that the company has not invested more seriously in its security – $55M investment should have paid for some good security experts? I am for sure not the security maniac myself – but this has never happened to me in my Internet life since the 90s.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is an excellent messaging tool. But companies come and go, and I believe that security should be a major concern for a communications company. This goes for all the social media out there. Security lacks can cause huge damage and if the company can’t close them, users will go elsewhere.
BTW – while writing this post, Crunchbase gives me a ’500 – Internal Server Error’. More problems ahead?
I finally got the time to separate the two blogs: “APIs and beyond” and “Travel favorites” into two URLs. It has been time as I got already complaints and the two topics weren’t related at all. This is also valid for the RSS feeds which are now separate, so please subscribe to the one that you are interested in. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Google I/O was an amazing conference. Not just for the new Google HTC phone – Google Wave was a big surprise! Well done! Watch the video above. It’s worth the 1h 20min. After watching this you’ll be convinced that Google Wave WILL be the new e-mail.
We at 3scale had a big event as well. Lots of new contacts and feedback has been very positive. People like our light weight, proxy-less approach. An API Management Solution that can be implemented in a plug & play, self-serve way. Great feedback, from smaller companies up to the enterprise world and a big thanks to the Google team for their great support.
Announcing 3scale at the Google I/O developer conference on May 27/28, 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The 3scale US team will be present after several weeks of preparation. Watch out for our new T-Shirts: “Don’t worry, be API”
Thanks a lot to Steven Willmott and Carlos Merida for their preparation. We have created a new service called AppSpotImage which has been built on top of Google’s App Engine. AppSpotImage is demonstrating a highly scalable and easy integration of 3scale as an API managment solution for developers using App Engine.
“20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.”
I have been posting about this video quite a bit on Twitter: Tim Berners-Lee talking at the TED conference in February 2009 in Long Beach, California. His slogan: Raw Data Now!
Some quotes:
“Now I want you to put your data on the web”
“Raw Data Now!”
“It’s all about linked data”
See also a good write up from Compute Magazine here.
This is a mandatory watch for anybody interested in the next wave of the Internet. It’s going to be about leveraging linked (raw) data to generate synergies, unlocking its potential. So, c’mon guys, it’s not that difficult: Make your data available to the world now. And do it with 3scale. Trust me – it’s the easiest and fastest way of doing it.
Martin Tantow, is a senior marketing & bus dev executive with 15 years experience in e-commerce, telecoms, software & digital media.
He is a senior advisor with Booz & Company, delivering strategic growth assessments for leading technology firm in the US and building the company's footprint in Silicon Valley.
Martin has built two companies in enterprise software & mobile telecoms and is a mentor and advisor to other start-ups.
He loves good food, cycling, white sandy beaches and many other things.
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