During the recent Mashery Business of APIs conference, I heard from a lot of different companies on how, why, and to what end they were exposing APIs. I was particularly interested in the business model piece of it. Here is a brief summary of some of the business models that can be associated with an API. As a BizDev Lead Generation Tool / Funnel The BizDev Funnel approach towards APIs was something that I heard ...

From business of apis conference, my notes: Dan Jacobson - NPR 45M pageviews, 8M monthly uniques Major Media lagging other verticals in API exposure, instead sticking with RSS. Target Audiences: end usersnpR's digital media teamNPR member stationsNPR biz partnersContent aggregators like Yahoo and Google Measures of Success: Business- get content out to stations- improve connections with biz partners- scalability for npr.org- creat epossible revenue opportunities Audience- distribution of content to existing users- reach new users- ...

These are my live notes from Michelle Azar's presentation at the Business of APIs conference. Best Buy, VP emerging channels 150K employees, most tech savvy, most under 25, many developers. Growth will come not from making one big store. But by putting stores where the people are. APIs reflect this. Best Buy Remix is the Best Buy API Affiliates was the first effort API now available for commercial use. API Objectives Brand PresenceTraffic, and conversion ...

These are my live notes from Allen Hurff's of MySpace's presentation at the Business of APIs conference. Allen Hurff from MySpace (svp myspace) History of MySpace APIs 2006 Helio ProjectSOAPSnoCap Didn't even have internal apis at thsi point. 2007 Built a mobile API team.Core API TeamOpenSocial .5REST 2008 OpenSocial .8RESTOauthOpenIDData AvailabilityDeveloper Platform Team Web Identity Content GenerationSocial graphreputationauthenticationprofileactivity What makes me me: what i say about mewhat others say about meWhat i domy social graph ...

These are my live notes from the Netflix presentation at the Business of APIs conference. Michael Hart - director of engineering at Netflix Strategy: API Goals Enable Dvlpt of of Netflix experiences offsite Leverage External developers, platforms, and users of platforms, ideas Success Measured by: - registered developers- live applications- subs engaging with netflixnew sub acquisitions- subscriber delight Partner Value Prop: - Engagement with 8.7M subs- association with a strong brand- No ads. No pressure ...

I just listened to a fascinating keynote from Cody Simms of Yahoo at Widget Summit about the just launched Y!OS / Yahoo! Platform. Over the next couple of weeks, Yahoo! is going to attempt to map its own social graph based on the billions of data points (address books, IM activity, email activity) collected by its property. My take is that this will be an implicit mapping effort of a scale that has not yet ...

Back to back presentations at Widget Summit from Friendster and Hi5 - two mammoth properties who are doing very well outside of the US. Some interesting stats in here: Widgets Around the World Friendster (David Jones, VP Marketing) Top 20 Global Website 3rd largest in the world 85M users Number one in Asia #1 in user engagement, 185 minutes per month on Friendster average Top six social networks haven't changed in the last couple years ...

I just listened to a fascinating keynote from Cody Simms of Yahoo at Widget Summit about the just launched Y!OS / Yahoo! Platform. Over the next couple of weeks, Yahoo! is going to attempt to map its own social graph based on the billions of data points (address books, IM activity, email activity) collected by its property. My take is that this will be an implicit mapping effort of a scale that has not yet ...

I’ve always considered toolbars / extensions to be the hardest path to a successful distributed business. A download is a formidable barrier to growth, no matter how much value that download provides. I’ve discussed the challenges of building a toolbar powered business on this blog here and here. For every StumbleUpon, there have been countless Meetros – good ideas, good products, but just not quite enough juice to overcome the download barrier. But all that ...

When the first bubble burst back towards the end of 2001, I was forced to take a job that I didn???t want, running HR for a dying, publicly traded telecom company. My main accomplishment as Director of HR was the take the company from 240 employees to 75 employees, in order to get the company ready for merger. I did this, and it was brutal. Many of the employees had been with the company for ...

Nick O'Neill has the scoop on Scott Rafer's presentation at the Berlin at the Facebook Developer Conference:When speaking at the Facebook developer conference today in Berlin, Scott Rafer declared that Facebook platform dead. He posted statistics including one that I posted that suggests Facebook widgets are dead. Lookery???s own statistics from Quantcast suggest that their publisher traffic has been almost halved since the new site design was released.My company has also been paying less attention ...

Here's a one day conference for a reasonable price coming up in San Francisco - the Business of APIs: As its name suggests, "The Business of APIs" is not a technical conference. It is a place where the people responsible for bringing in revenue, building traffic or building content syndication channels will learn how some of the most prominent and successful media and internet companies are enjoying significant growth through building a web services distribution ...

Just heard this off Twitter. Automattic, recent buyers of IntenseDebate as well, is the acquirer. Automattic seems to be stocking up on distributed tools. Congratulations to Lenny (and by association, Scott Rafer and Fergus Burns), and what the hell, the whole town of Sligo, Ireland.

I made the trek down to Stanford tonight to catch the VLAB Lifestreaming Panel. My trip was an epic fail - a 19 minute wait for a Bart train, followed by a jam packed Cal-Train, followed by a Stanford University bus driver who had never heard of the Stanford Business School. I arrived 15 minutes late, did not get a seat, and as such, was just not able to get into comfortable blogging position. I ...

Distributed commerce is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Previously on this blog, I’ve covered companies like ThisNext, CartFly, Zazzle, Kaboodle, MPire, and Edgeio and their various forays into allowing commerce to take place at the edge via widgets. Of this group of companies, only the now defunct Edgeio went all in and allowed actual in widget credit card submission – the rest of these companies take you right up to the ...

I have come to believe that if its not in the main column, it gets ignored. A river of content, is what it seems most people want to consume Originally posted as a comment by fredwilson on A VC using Disqus.

If you're into widgets, I recommend taking some time and going through these two posts: CNET's discussion of the maturing of the widget space, and Widgetbox's CEO Will Price's response. The CNET article seems to use the terms "widgets" and "applications" interchangeably, which is a bit misleading, but for the article is well researched with a number of quotes from companies like Slide and RockYou. I found the discussion of whether the term "widget" is ...

One of the areas that I expect to explode in the next 12 to 18 months is distributed commerce. One of the earliest players in this space is Cartfly – a start-up out of Phoenix, that is attempting to enable individuals and small businesses to leverage the social web to drive sales. The user flow goes something like this: you set up your store on Cartfly.com and populate your store with products. For each product, ...