API Tricks and Tips: APIs Deliver Profits
By John Greaves
Application Programming Interfaces(API) used to be a means to market products, they were often free and served to drive traffic to a site or increase buzz around a company’s offering. Now we’ve begun to see increasing numbers of companies built around monetizing APIs rather than relegating them to marketing tools status.
While OneRiot’s success with Riotwise is well documented and DMB recently unpacked the potential behind geodata APIs in a March 2010 article, there are other areas from telecom to financial data management where API companies are pushing the boundaries of how APIs can be profitable.
Twilio
Twilio CEO and co founder Jeff Lawson describes their service as “Amazon Web Services meets telecom.” Simply put Lawson says Twilio lets developers build applications that can make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages. Lawson says Twilio aimed to combine infrastructure web services with telecom in a new way. “In the enterprise there have been application development platforms in the past. What we were trying to do is to change and bring the capabilities that enterprises have had for a while and really bring that to every developer. And so making technology simpler was a major goal of ours but the good thing was that there was precedent people paying for not just telecom on a per use basis but also paying for infrastructure web services, so people were accustomed to if you want servers on demand paying Amazon for them.” According to a Crunchbase company profile, “Before Twilio, you would have had to learn some foreign telecom programming languages, or set up an entire stack of PBX software … Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve problems quickly and reliably.”
Twilio“s list of customers includes web development shop 37signals which uses Twilio in their Campfire product and they also uses theme based contests to inspire aspiring developers. “We have a developer contest every week and for over a year we’ve given away a Netbook every week to the developer who writes the best application with a certain theme. We give developers a week, sometimes two to build something along the lines of the theme. We’re getting developers involved in the brand and the company and also giving developers an extra incentive to build something that they’re thinking about building,” Lawson said.
Twistage
According to Twistage founder and CEO David Wadler, the company has “a rather extensive footprint in enterprise.” Since 2007, they have gone from what blogger Liz Gannes referred to as “a stealthy newly funded video startup” to an industry leader that can boast partnerships with Jive Social Business Software.
The secret behind this rise is an easy to understand metering monetization model that allows their customers to purchase allocations in blocks of API components. “It’s much easier for non technical people, and oftentimes those are the people who have control of the budget or have to make the case for the logistical spend.” When overages occur, Wadler says Twistage works with the customer to address it. “In general as a model we don’t like to penalize people for being successful so where possible we volume discount them,” Wadler said.
Twistage’s approach has led to a customer base which includes Mochila, PerezHilton.com, The New York Observer, Kidzbop, and Fast Company, is a technology partner with Jive, a Social Business Software leader and targets companies who already have an existing IT budget and infrastructure who need and want to use video for education and product marketing.
X Ignite
Pete Soderling, founder of Stratus Security Technologies an API monetization consultancy, calls XIgnite “one of the forerunners of this industry” for its use of APIs in financial information delivery and distribution.
X Ignite bills itself as the leading provider of financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications. In fact, it claims XIgnite web services are used to power hundreds of mission-critical applications from proprietary systems handling hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate loans to applications trading gold, crude oil, or currencies around the clock and around the world.
“They have relationships with all of the major stock exchanges and they pull and suck in data from the exchanges, normalize it, sort of make it uniform and then basically act as a distribution channel and resell that data to other financial institutions, developers, investment banks, research firms what have you, so they’re like sort of a middle man in taking in that valuable data from the exchanges and then blasting it out,” Soderling said.
What Does It Mean?
As businesses try to ride out the economic storm, they are bailing unnecessary costs over the side and attempting to reef the sails with tech solutions that do the same things better, faster and cheaper. API developers who can add value without overloading the bottom line may find that the recession cloud is lined with success.
International Companies Embrace Mobile Bill Pay Technology
By Moria Byrne
Remote bill pay is the next trend in mobile banking.
The collaboration of mobile phone operating systems, banking institutions and money transfer systems are working together to create a new way to manage your money.
The next generation allows “anyone on any operator system” to establish a mobile banking account, it’s no longer a “closed system,” according to Diarmuid Mallon of Sybase. The program has been “massively successful” in Kenya.
In places like Kenya, where paying utility bills is a cash-only business and getting cash is often a time-consuming and travel intensive process, mobile banking is a huge advantage. Mobi-Cash users will soon be able to pay their bills simply by sending a text message to their bank in Kenya. The other advantage is that users will be able to “pay-as-they-go,” Mallon says. People won’t have to pay an exorbitant amount each month. Mobile banking is much more flexible system for paying bills. Users can pay weekly or even daily.
It’s much easier to access your money, according to Mallon. Mobile banking allows a “prearrangement of services around people” instead of the other way around.
Currently, users spend an average of more than 10 percent of the value of the transaction to send money through official channels. The cost of mobile banking is merely the cost of a text message. Moneygram took the opportunity of growing consumer interest in online banking and mobile phone use to push cell phone distributor’s to make mobile banking more affordable for mobile phone users.
“By collapsing a value chain and removing a barrier to entry by doing it from cash to phone, I think remittances play a key role in the ongoing adoption and expansion of mobile wallets,” says Justin Monk, director/consumer products of the Americas, Moneygram. The company is one of the leading international money transmittance services using mobile banking.
Austrian government enables mobile commerce across all counties. The most popular use is paying parking tickets instantly. Yet, Austria is in the minority of European countries utilizing mobile banking beyond the basic bank institution to customer practices.
In Asia, mobile banking is booming. One of the most successful mobile banking trials was masterminded by Moneygram and Smart mobile in Philippines in partnership with Mozido, a Dallas mobile gateway service provider. Launched in 2004, Smart Padala has more than eight million users. Moneygram continues to roll out its joint program with Smart through the country and plans to eventually implement the program to their entire user network.
M-Pesa and Moneybox Africa are two other notable pilot programs that are growing in popularity. M-Pesa is a mobile banking system run by IBM Mobile service on behalf of mobile network operator, Vodaphone. The technology platform, provided by Microsoft has been so successful, the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation highlighted M-Pesa as an important charitable initiative by Vodaphone in 2009.
In fact, the flow of money from developed nations to developing countries grew 130 percent in the past decade; that is over USD $248 Billion in remittance, according to the World Bank.
Noteable Mobile Banking Platforms
Mobile banking platforms are measured on reliability, flexibility and services rendered. A robust mobile payment platform may include: airtime topup, bill pay and transferring money to other people and spending their money at a point of sale all available through mobile banking transactions.
Sybase, winner of two MobileTrax 2010 Mobility Awards for Best in Class Mobile Banking and Mobile Device Management Solutions, is one of the leading mobile banking platforms. Sybase’s mobile banking services are comprehensive. Mbanking 365 provides end-to-end mobile commerce solutions for banks and financial institutions and their users, mobile messaging services for business owners and mobile operations management. Sybase 365 reaches 850 operators with 4 billion global subscribers.
The other largest mobile banking platform provider is Microsoft .Net platform, which offers multi-channel platform accessible to branch, ATM, Internet and now mobile banking. In a case study with OCBC Bank, Microsoft.Net produced 30 percent time saving and took less than four months to roll out in Malaysia in comparison to the Singapore launch with a different platform provider.
“By meeting our specifications, Microsoft .NET enables us to move quickly in application and system development, with time and cost savings,” says Patrick Chew, SVP, head delivery, OCBC Bank Consumer Financial Services. “We used Microsoft .NET to integrate our CRM tools with our ATM network to extract important customer information, which allows us to convert customer information into up and cross-sell opportunities,” he adds.
As the services are SMS-based and available to across various mobile phone providers, travelers are taking full advantages of mobile banking services.
Advantages for Travelers
There are also huge advantages for mobile users who travel a lot. Mobile banking users will be able to sit in the airport and pay their bills simply by sending a text message to their mobile banking account, no smartphone needed.
The user simply requests a reminder to send bill payment alerts to their cell phone. The message will ask if they want to pay their electric bill through the mobile phone, for example. The user simply replies yes or no. If they reply yes, money is transferred instantly to the electricity service provider. And as the message is sent through texting rather than internet services or a phone call, there are no roaming charges. The cost is the same as any other mobile text message.
“I think that we’re at the beginning of a very long and very exciting migration to mobile services,” Monk says of mobile banking services in general.
While the need for mobile banking services is increasing at a slower rate in Europe and developed countries, recent Forrester Research study proved that interest in online banking is growing. Northern Europe leads in the adoption of online banking, with 90 percent of Dutch and 87 percent of Swedish online consumers having used it in the past three months. European Technographics Financial Services Online Survey, Q4 2009 looked at online banking and money management tools on behalf of Forrester Research. The countries leading in online banking are the most active mobile banking users in Europe, namely, Spain and Italy. One in five mobile phone owners use mobile banking in some form -checking account balances, transferring money, or paying bills through text messaging (SMS) or the mobile Internet.
Three of four adults have a mobile phone and regularly use SMS in Europe, according to a Forrester Report on mobile phone use. Some countries have as many as 88 percent of mobile users texting Sweden is one example. “These European adults who use a mobile phone represent the largest audience of all the electronic channels,” says Christine Hamilton, an analyst of Forrester Research in a recent blog.
Western Union also has a mobile banking service, Western Union Anywhere. Its mobile banking services are available in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The international leaders partnering with this money transferral service include: South Africa-based Fundamo, India-based mChek, U.S.-based Sybase 365 and Singapore-based Utiba Pte among others.
While inexpensive cell phones are abundant throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America access to banks and remittance services are not for everyone. Mobile banking provides users with immediate and convenient access to money transfer services from where ever they are.
Yet, the growth of online banking is largely a result of several changes in online technology in the past decade. The number of mobile phone users grew globally as did the number of people shopping, banking and running a business online. Upon seeing the development growth and customer interest in mobile banking by migrant workers and others living in areas not easily accessible to banks or ATMs, Moneygram, Western Union and others pressured mobile platform vendors to decrease the integration costs and “accelerate go-to-market activities for banks and mobile operators by creating standard technical deployments,” according to Hamilton.
In addition to mobile banking leaders, Kenya and the Philippines mobile remittance services are expected to continue to expand globally in the Middle East and Europe as well as to other countries areas of Asia and Africa.
A variety of businesses are taking advantage of mobile banking in order to create convenient and accessible ways to purchase services any place and at any time, Mallon says.
New York Times Pay Wall Will Go Up, But Where?
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. spoke at the SABEWs annual convention/Mike Reicher
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. spoke at the SABEW's annual convention/Mike Reicher
By Matt Robinson
PHOENIX — The New York Times is building a metered pay wall debuting in 2011, but still figuring out where to put it.
The pay wall will allow readers free access to stories initially, but after a certain number of page views or another metric, readers will have to pay. The Times decided that another stream of revenue was needed as they continue to develop their digital advertising model.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the paper, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference, says the strategy was designed for the nytimes.com site, given its national and international reach. But he didn’t recommend it for other newspapers, including The Boston Globe, a sister publication, because of its local focus.
Figuring out how to quantify reader’s usage is difficult. Readers don’t see 10 clicks on a photo slideshow as similar to 10 different page views, Sulzberger said, and neither should the paper. He’s also uncertain on how the more than 60 blogs on the site will be monitored as well, including CUNY’s Local and NYU’s upcoming East Village site.
Sulzberger explained that the success of the new project is “inextricably connected to the promise of quality journalism.” The Times research and development department, which was started to explore digital initiatives, is spearheading the transition.
That translation decided against a possible “iTunes model,” where consumers buy songs for around a dollar. That model would do the same per story, but unlike music, readers are unlikely to enjoy a story over and over again, Sulzberger says.
He avoided forecasts on how successful the pay wall will be, focusing on the current environment. “It’s what the Times needs to do today,” he says, adding, “It will take time to get this right.”
The paper expects to lose some traffic from people who refuse to pay, but are confident loyalists will continue to support the paper. News on the iPhone app will continue to be free.
The Times has started an ad campaign for its New York coverage as the paper will be competing with the Wall Street Journal’s New York edition, which debuts next month.
SlideShare Branded Channels
In the world of business there’s rarely a case of TMI, unless you happen to be Toyota. Oversharing is the rule of the road, especially when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, the lingua franca for all who toil in the trenches of commerce. SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing business presentations and documents, has been a faithful business sidekick for business since 2006. You can upload PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations and Word and Open Office documents. You can share them on your blog or website, or send a URL by email. Transcripts of your files will be indexed by Internet search engines and enhance the search engine ranking of your presentations and documents. Since the site is searchable by then outside world, it’s a great and inexpensive - read free - way to spread the word. Well, a good thing has just gotten better, Slideshare has launched a new Channels service to provide custom-branded micro sites that businesses can use to showcase presentations, whitepapers and webinars to a professionals audience. Some of the early adopters include Adobe, Ogilvy, Microsoft and Razorfish Marketing.
Features:
- Share PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations as well as Word and Open Office documents
- Can embed your presentation/document in a blog or website
- Has apps to share via Facebook, Linkedin and XING
See how ReadWriteWeb uses Slideshare branded channels.
WatchNBuy.com to White-Label its Interactive Video Commerce Player
By: itvt.com
Interactive video commerce company, WatchNBuy.com, announced Wednesday that it is offering its interactive video player on a white-label basis to other Web site operators.
An Emerging Industry: eBook Brokers
By Ron Callari
Digital content distribution as an industry emerged as a result of books moving from the traditional world of publishing to online platforms such as PDFs, eBooks and other ePub formats. Some licensing brokers for eBooks like Ingram Digital grew out of their traditional publishing units that have been in the industry for more than 40 years. Others like Robot Comics emerged within the last few years to solely focus on digital formats for specific genres like graphic novels.
Some of the advantages of digital vs. traditional publishing “is the compressed time from the distributor’s inventory to the online retailer or library’s shelf, [due to] the elimination of shipping, unpacking and shelving for the channel,” according to David Burleigh, director of marketing for OverDrive, a leading global distributor of eBooks and audiobooks.
In the traditional world, “books progressed through a well-defined supply chain from publisher to printer to shipper to wholesaler/distributor to bookstore,” notes Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, which is both an eBook publisher and distribution platform. Because the eBook supply chain is nascent and still evolving, Coker sees the industry in a state of still fleshing out its distribution channels. “Some publishers go direct to their customers, others go direct to the retail and others use distribution and aggregation intermediaries such as Smashwords or Ingram Digital,” he says.
With hundreds of mainstream and niche eBook distributors entering the field, the aforementioned firms aggressively distinguish themselves from the competition. OverDrive sees its distinction as providing the best customer support as well as the largest collection of digital content (including eBooks, audiobooks, music and video) for libraries on a single platform. Smashwords focuses exclusively on the independently published eBooks from self-published authors and small independent presses.
Other publishers acting as their own distributors focus on specific genres. While Robot Comics publishes graphic novels and currently works with Apple, Google and Amazon, its deputy director, Dave Baxter, refers to these companies as “marketplaces” or “storefronts” vs. distributors. According to Baxter, “in the digital world, there’s very little distinction between the store and the distributor, often none at all.”
Graphic novels have the inherent challenge of adapting color images to Kindle’s black-and-white-and-shades-of-grey format. Baxter indicates that “few are flexible enough to handle the needs of a graphic novel library and allow them to shine.”
Overdrive’s Burleigh notes that “early on, romance was the clear leader in libraries, probably proportionately more than in print, but other than that, we now see growth across the spectrum of all genres.”
According to Baxter, “due to the percentage of profits taken by the distributors, the limitations imposed by the software they work with, and the lack of direct control over the material display and the ability to market on certain levels, a distributor truly has to prove their worth in order to be literally, worthwhile.” So Baxter and his company continue to search for distributors whose business models are closer to the iPhone app model, but “so far the jury is out,” he says.
Since Amazon presently represents and sells its own library of eBooks exclusively on its Kindle devices, in some respects it can be reviewed as a competitor of eBook distributors. However, according to Overdrive’s Burleigh, he believes, “Amazon has a different business model, so we can’t really compare us to them.”
On the other hand, Smashwords just signed a distribution agreement with Amazon that will one day allow its books to be available in the Amazon Kindle store. As Coker puts it, this makes Amazon, “a competitor and a partner.”
Regarding end users, a recent DMB article highlighted the innovative distribution deals between companies and schools. The Blyth Academy in Toronto was touted as the first high school to purchase the Sony Readers for its student body. Similarly, OverDrive supplies eBooks and audiobooks to several colleges, including McGill University in Montreal, the Virginia Community Colleges in addition to K-12 schools. It also has a similar program for public and corporate libraries.
As far as Sony being a competitor, Coker makes the distinction: “Sony is definitely not a competitor. They’re a distribution partner [they sell our books] and we also help power their Sony Publisher Portal, which makes it easy for authors and publishers to publish their content into the Sony Store.”
With established libraries of their own, one would think that Sony and Barnes & Noble might not need a distributor for their online downloads. However, Burleigh states, that “one of the benefits of working with OverDrive is that it simplifies the process for libraries and retailers to work with a single distributor rather than hundreds of publishers.”
Coker agrees with Burleigh, and adds, “It’s time consuming and expensive for a retailer to enter into and maintain contractual business and technology relationships with hundreds or thousands of small publishers.” This is why he believes that “Sony, B&N and others value working with distributors and aggregators such as Smashwords. With us, they only have to manage one relationship, one technical integration and cut one check.”
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