Leading up to the elections, a lot of people have become poll-savvy. They obsess over daily tracking stats on sites like Real Clear Politics. It’s not hard to understand why—even for non-political junkies, it’s fascinating to monitor national trends in real time.
It’s nice to track that kind of progression in the API world too. After all, APIs and mashups weren’t even on corporate America’s radar until just a few years ago, and now they’re increasingly seen as the surest path to both new business and greater revenue for startups and conglomerates alike.
That’s why one resource we track regularly here at Mashery is ProgrammableWeb, which keeps tabs on mashups and open APIs across the web. We’re privileged to announce that John Musser, its founder, will be speaking at our Business of APIs Conference on Oct. 2, 2012 at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco. His topic: APIs: What's Hot, What's Not.
APIs themselves are surely hot, and the ProgrammableWeb dashboard monitors the heat. The PW directory hit API number 7,000 in August, just three months after it got to 6,000. As PW noted in its own blog, what’s most remarkable is not just the sheer number of new APIs (and mashups, now up to 6,782), or the pace of growth, but the staggering diversity in the field: “There are many, many ways now to be an API provider and also many new tools for API consumers.”
John will be talking about what’s most interesting to developers and businesses alike: The state of VC funding for the API market, which brands have reached the billionaires club (getting at least a billion API calls a day) and which might be ready to reach trillionaire status, and of course, the business models being used to monetize the practice.
During his 20 years in software development, he’s shipped no less than five award-winning software products while working with companies as diverse as Electronic Arts, Credit Suisse, MTV and Bell Labs.
That’s why the Business of APIs conference—which will go to New York and London after San Francisco—offers the perfect forum in which to get a handle on where we’re headed. Join us.