This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.
But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and then ask some more questions. Here are two themes I am picking up on from all these conversations.
Speed: APIs are making things faster. They connect apps. Software is eating the world. APIs connect the software so it can eat the world faster. Distribution is a driver of speed. The more distributed the API network, the better it can scale and the faster it can work to connect apps and create a mesh that is increasingly more effective than content-delivery networks.
An API distributed from a central point can slow things down considerably if the load increases on the server. API management companies are pushing APIs to the edge in order to manage the billions of calls that they get daily from service providers that connect the apps into websites, mobile devices, cars — you name it.
Data-intensive APIs are doing something else. They are slowing the network. To alleviate the issue, service providers are looking at the I/O, trying to find ways to make the data connect faster to the APIs that, in turn, connect the apps so someone can post a picture or get a text message about an update from a blog. It’s this need for speed that cloud services are built upon. Scale out the infrastructure and app developers will use it to get better performance and overall quality improvements. What’s still emerging are the advancements of the networks themselves. Again, that’s where software enters the picture and the further need for APIs. The infrastructure needs to be programmed. How that’s done is the big question.
Automation: Once one part of a system gets automated, the rest of it soon follows. APIs are the glue that makes the automation possible. People want to connect their apps. It’s why services like Zapier and IFTTT have gained such popularity.
People want to connect apps to get work done and reshape their reality. Chris Dancy uses IFTTT and Zapier to connect apps that feed into Google Calendar, Evernote and Excel. He uses these services to quantify his life. Through automation, Dancy can program himself and the things around him. He can connect his dog into the network and track its movement in the house.
In this new reality, everything becomes a node. You, me, the lamp post across the street all can have sensors and APIs to connect with other people and things. If this is the case, then the API economy is more about how this new network makes for different forms of commerce that maximize these connected, automated systems. The questions: What are these new forms of commerce? What are the infrastructure and systems needed for this new reality?
These are two themes in particular I look forward to discussing.
There’s a third but it’s an open-ended one that may be better off ruminating about in the hallways or over a beer. And that’s how this new idea about data and APIs is better understood by more than 1 percent of the people out there. It’s not just the geeks who should be able to live in the future but everyone else, too.
Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person. Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.
Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on building an API platform that extends the capability for businesses to take commerce beyond a website.
Vice President of Marketing Matt Dione said the company will use the funding to invest in its API platform.
In particular, Elastic Path will invest in its Cortex API, a touch point broker that is designed to embed e-commerce capabilities where the experience takes place. That might be a website, a mobile platform, or through a car. The API brokers the capabilities on the backend.
The company will also use the investment to integrate with content management companies such as OpenText, with which it announced a partnership this past week.
Elastic Path is betting its future on the concept of the API Economy — this idea that the world is connecting deeper through APIs, which is in turn creating a new form of commerce that is built on a deep distribution network.
Instead, ReKognition can tell if something is a face or not, or if it’s male or female, it can detect emotion, and to some extent, it can even tell how beautiful someone is. (On that latter point, the API has been trained somewhat subjectively by feeding it a series of celebrity photos to define the universal standard of beauty. Those who prefer a specific look may disagree.)
Though the company can’t reveal its customers by name due to privacy agreements, one is an Asia dating site which checks to verify that users’ profile photos are of men and women, as opposed to other things like a dog or flower, for example. The site also uses the beauty and gender identification capabilities to help it with its own matchmaking algorithms.
Another use case for ReKognition comes from the advertising industry, where a small handful of customers have been building prototype digital, interactive signage which adapts the ad displayed to the customer looking at it. Yes, it’s very “Minority Report” – by knowing the viewer’s gender and age range, these real-world ads can be more narrowly and granularly targeted, as they are online.
Now, with ReKognition for Glass (or ReKoGlass, as it’s being called), the company is making its computer vision capabilities available to those building apps for Google’s new wearable technology.
“Our API actually offers different face detection, face reading and scene understanding, so we’re not just a facial recognition company,” says Orbeus CEO Ning Xu, explaining that ReKognition doesn’t violate Google’s updated Glass policies. “But even without facial recognition, we can do a lot of things with your face, without revealing your identity.”
The company’s website offers some ideas, like taking attendance in the classroom or determining how many in an audience are male or female, for example. Of course, for many of these use cases, it would be more practical if images could be processed and analyzed in real-time. This is not something that’s possible today with Glass, which doesn’t yet permit direct developer access to the camera, however.
But Xu thinks that will change in time. “I believe – and our team believes – this is a temporary issue, and they’re definitely going to improve that part on Google’s side,” he says. “That’s what we’re offering this API now.”
The Mountain View-based startup was founded by former Bostonians Meng Wang and Tianqiang Liu, and Xu later joined as CEO. The team took the company through Chicago’s Excelerate Labs (now TechStars Chicago) before relocating to Google’s backyard. Orbeus launched its API to the public last August, and has grown its customer base to over 1,000, a small percentage of which are now paying. Today, Orbeus sees over 3 million API calls for its freemium product, which is priced affordably in order to encourage sign-ups, with 40,000 free API calls (500 per day) available for free.
Xu explains that in addition to its tiered service, the company also sells to enterprise customers, and is now in the process of closing a deal with a photo album provider who will use ReKognition to group photos by faces to make the process of building a photo book easier for end users.
The startup is currently in the process of closing on $1.1 million in seed funding in a round led by ZhenFund (a super angel fund from China), and CRCM Opportunity Fund. The round should be closed by Friday.
Interested Glass developers can now download the new ReKoGlass SDK here for free.
Google today launched a new dashboard for businesses and Google+ page owners that will provide them with a single dashboard to manage many of their daily activities around Google’s tools. The new dashboard will, for example, allow businesses to update their info, including their website URLs, store hours and phone numbers, across Google Maps, Search and on Google+ right from the tools Overview tab.
As Google’s Pavni Diwanji notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to “make it easier to manage your online presence – all across Google.”
In addition to managing their info across Google’s properties, the new dashboard will also give businesses the ability to monitor their Google+ notifications and to perform standard Google+ actions to manage photos and videos. They can also start Hangouts right from the dashboard.
Besides managing their presence, Google also allows these users to manage their AdWords Express and Google Offers campaigns and provides them with a number of stats for their businesses. These stats are actually pretty interesting and not something Google has made available in an easy to use package before. They will allow business owners to see the top searches for their business and top locations requesting driving directions to their stores (so they can strategically place local ads, for example). It will also display a set of basic performance stats for their Google+ accounts.
The dashboard may be one of the fruits of Google’s acquisition of Wildfire almost a year ago, one of the top Facebook Page management tools. Wildfire specialized in helping businesses communicate with customers and track their performance.
It’s fascinating to see Google build all of these tools itself. That’s a big contrast to Facebook’s approach, which has focused on opening APIs to let third-parties build presence management tools for businesses. Google gets tighter control of the experience, but can’t provide. customized set-ups for different types of businesses.
Google’s been trying to unify its consumer-facing products. Seems the insistence on cohesion is making its way to its business offering as well.
Google today launched a new dashboard for businesses and Google+ page owners that will provide them with a single dashboard to manage many of their daily activities around Google’s tools. The new dashboard will, for example, allow businesses to update their info, including their website URLs, store hours and phone numbers, across Google Maps, Search and on Google+ right from the tools Overview tab.
As Google’s Pavni Diwanji notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to “make it easier to manage your online presence – all across Google.”
In addition to managing their info across Google’s properties, the new dashboard will also give businesses the ability to monitor their Google+ notifications and to perform standard Google+ actions to manage photos and videos. They can also start Hangouts right from the dashboard.
Besides managing their presence, Google also allows these users to manage their AdWords Express and Google Offers campaigns and provides them with a number of stats for their businesses. These stats are actually pretty interesting and not something Google has made available in an easy to use package before. They will allow business owners to see the top searches for their business and top locations requesting driving directions to their stores (so they can strategically place local ads, for example). It will also display a set of basic performance stats for their Google+ accounts.
The dashboard may be one of the fruits of Google’s acquisition of Wildfire almost a year ago, one of the top Facebook Page management tools. Wildfire specialized in helping businesses communicate with customers and track their performance, much the way the G+ Dashboard now does.
It’s fascinating to see Google build all of these tools itself. That’s a big contrast to Facebook’s approach, which has focused on opening APIs to let third-parties build presence management tools for businesses. Google gets tighter control of the experience, but can’t provide. customized set-ups for different types of businesses.
Google’s been trying to unify its consumer-facing products. Seems the insistence on cohesion is making its way to its business offering as well.
