1000 Flowers Bloom

Mashup Camp 2 Winner - Weather Bonk

Weather Bonk won the best Mashup award from the MashupCamp conference.

See the bottom of this post from David Berlind. Hopefully David will put up a full post in a conference roundup.

This is (literally) a big vote of confidence by the developer community in Silicon Valley. The way the conference works is that therebout 30 websites that demo to the 400 attendees at the conference and each attendee is allowed to vote for one and only one site that they think is the best. 

I know that Dave Schorr has put a ton of time and effort into Weather Bonk and it’s great to see him be recognized.

Cooqy Review - interesting interface into EBay

The founder of Cooqy dropped me an email asking me to check out his site. To be honest I don't normally do this kind of thing because there are lots of other sites out there that handle reviewing new sites and products better than I ever could.

However, I am interested in how people are using APIs that are being provided and I think that this is a really full featured example of taking APIs and running with it to create something cool. On top of that I am looking for a new laptop bag so I thought I'd give it a spin and see what it was like.

I think the interface for Cooqy is interesting. It's a Flash UI that provides all sorts of goodness like better search capabilities to find what you want better. I suspect that if you're an EBay fanatic (and there are lots of them out there) that you will really enjoy that. Things like automatically showing a zoomed element of a picture is cool as well.

In the end I did end up putting in a bid on Cooqy for a laptop bag so we'll see if I win!

My tactical suggestions for Cooqy:

• searched for roomba and couldn't find anything but found it on the Ebay site
• that teeny tiny scroll box you leave for descriptions needs to be bigger, much too small right now.

On a big picture level:
I'm not sure I understand clearly why I want to use Cooqy versus going direct to EBay. Is it that the UI is so much better that I would use it over EBay? Are there other benefits I'm missing?

Mashup Camp Pre-Party

For those of you going to Mashup Camp be sure to check out the Mashup Camp Pre-Party being hosted by Strike Iron on July 11. Be sure to register if you are interested.

Mashup Camp Winner

I couldn't be there for the final day of Mashup Camp but the winner of the Mashup contest was PodBop. It's pretty cool - a mashup of Eventful data along with podcasts from the bands. Better would have been if they had taken Zvents data since a) Zvents has a lot more events and b) since I'm an advisor to Zvents.

My favorite mashup was mastrbeta. It's a site that lets you keep track of all the betas that are going on out there. One Beta to rule them all. The name is hysterical too!

Interview with Chad Dickerson (Director, Platform Evangelist Search & Marketplace for Yahoo)

Mashup Camp was great for meeting interesting people. One of the folks I met is Chad Dickerson. He’s a platform evangelist at Yahoo who helps promote APIs not only externally but also internally. It was fascinating to hear about the Hackathons that he is running inside of Yahoo.

His favorite mashup - Tagcloud.

 

Hopefully he’ll get the side project that he’s working on up soon and I’ll be able to blog and podcast about it!

You can listen to the podcast here.

 

Mashup Camp - Standard model for describing APIs

Paul Martino and I had our WSFinder hats on for a really good discussion at Mashup Camp with John Musser from Programmable Web and Dave from Strike Iron.

What we decided to was agree on a common data format that we could put metadata about APIs in. We wanted to keep it as lightweight as possible so that people would use it and allow for portability of the informatino across of all our sites.

Would love readers feedback about what they think will work and if we're missing anything!

API/RSS format

• Title
• Keywords/Tags
• Free/Pay/Non-Commercial
• Description
• URL (For info)

Mashup Camp - Business Models in Mashups Transcript

Who's Here and what questions are there that people want to talk about?

Apologies if I  got people's names wrong or missed some content. It's very difficult to do transcription realtime!

Dave - Strike Iron - How do people want to make money with mashups
Danny - EBay - How are people currently making money with mashiups
Josh Scott - EBay - Monetize beyond adwords
Peter Rip - Leapfrog - No specific question
Rick Warner - ACME Innovation - What's usable and why?
Chris - Zap Target - APIs for emails
Peter - Sales Force.com - What's the mashup product that is the killer app on Salesforce
Chris Law - Aggregate Knowledge / WSFinder- Who else besdies the big players are making money off of APIs
Peter - Microsoft - How can Microsoft help others make money
Steve - RedMonk - How can APIs throttle innovation
Anu - Partysync - Are mashups a lifestyle business
John - Terms of service when do they decide they're ready to partner with someone or not
Brian - Time Warner / AOL - Instant messenger (100k users per day free) - iamalpha.com. Music distributed mashup in music
CNET - What are the social ecosystem of providers
Anu - Partysync - What requirements should display APIs have for content if it's being displayed for free.
Dave - BungeeLabs - Are developers of Mashups really interested in monetizing them.
Anu - Partysync - What responsibilities do big companies have to developers
How do you make money without getting absorbed?
How do you do ad targetting in a mashup?
What's the market size on a mashup?
Jeff - Online Highways - Does Yahoo bring the hammer down on people who use the APIs for non-commercial purposes?

What defines a commercial mashup? As soon as money is being made off it is it commercial?
Eleanor
- Yahoo is working on this, not figured out yet
- My theory is if you have a business card then it's grey and you need to get permission

Are there any other categories of mashups besides web based?
- mobile, music, instant messenger, search, commerce, maps, desktop widgits/gadgets, mashup development tools

What is a mashup? Same as an integreation?
- more than one source of data

Are API developers getting what they need?

CNET - Are you a non-profit, commercial, is it industrial art? How do you konw?
- I want to give a license that is as minimally restrictive as possible, I want to give people a lot of leeway before they become commercial. Need a way to classify it an monetize it.

Reliability of APIs. What are the SLAs?

How do you distribute the money - who gets paid?

In order for a mahsup to be able to be a business you need to have a contract in place.
- there needs to be a level of confidence around the relationship so that things don't change

How many in the room are providers of APIs? - 20/65
Consumers of APIs? - 75%
VCs? - 7/65
Enablers - 2 or 3

Themes - who is live and charging for APIs?

Comments:
- In our business its' based on email sent. End result is email communication.
- $1000 setup but revenue comes from email being sent. Our partners get a share of the revenue.
- Salesforce.com is a partner, their customers pay us per email sent
- software as a service

- Offer astrology reports. Referal fee as customers sign up customers, premium membership revenue
- The end user ends up paying the client who rev shares

- Inventory of tee times and sell the content that others can monetize
- Customer pays and kickback to the country club

- EBay, no need to charge for APIs because we make money in other ways when other people use them.
- We're not as nimble as we were before. Allow others to make money and build the business in the direction they want it go

- Anyone with an API into a shopping mechanism has an easy way

Is anybody today offering free at one level and charge at another?
- Amazon charges nothing at one level and charge at another
- Astrology site offers some free and gives a full report at charge
- Instant Messenger platform from AOL free up to 100k users per day - 5-10% off of the business you're making. Let people create a myspace like environment using

Will Google, Microsoft or Yahoo force Ads to come down?
- RSS API for spaces - wouldnt' be surprising if there was an ad in that RSS stream
- rumorcity.com - uses an Ad every 20th time if you don't pay their fee for geolocation

Imagine a Mashup for Skiing, who's got the best snow? There could be a sponsorship model there.

Lots of times users will use Yahoo Maps and Google Ads? Is there any stipulation about that?

If Google Advertises and gives you a cut back would mashup providers care?
- If the ads get in the way then we would switch APIs

Pay not to have ads on the maps.

If you're small how do I monetize not through Ads through APIs? Strike Iron does that.

Pay per call or per use?
- in general developers don't want to do that
- providers of the content want to do that
- Amazon finds it hard to keep track of everything. Reads are free, writes pay.
- Ebay wants to do it the other way around
- mitadvertisinglab is interesting - check that out.
- As a VC, I don't want to split a percentage of revenue with my OEM. Needs to be predictable, this part of the value stack goes to the providers.Want a fixed fee. Predictable fee of $1 per 1000. I know if my business will support this or not.

There's a compnay that wanted to use EBays APIs and forced a contract. Be sure to get the contract done. If I worry about being out innovated by EBay then we're in the wrong business.Microsoft, Google, EBay - this slowness applies to everybody. Big guys can't do that. There are a large number of folks get bought, the monetization may be getting bought by Microsoft, Google.

How many people are doing the mashups just as a hobby? Most people believe they are going to monetize their mashups. Acquire to hire is just a nice big signign bonus.

How many of the folks who are really trying to monetize are doing this to sell out? If someone came up to you and gave you a few hundred grand and stockoptions to buy you rmashup would you take it?

Somone created a service called Wayfaring. More importantly I hope it's 3k to 5k a month. It's a lifestyle business.

Mashups for your employer - 12/65
Mashups to build your own business - 20/65
Mashups for a hobby - 5/65
Build a mashup that wants VC - 4/65 people
Building to scratch an itch vs build for a business - 50%

If you want to succeed beyond a business do you need to be bought? The more vendors you can bring in the better so you are not beholden. A lot of times what I can do is build up an attractive userbase once I've gotten rolling I can switch out to a different provider, you have an answer to the VC question or buy out.

I talk to a lot of people who can build attractive apps on top of existing platforms. This is a unique opportunity to build a real business on top of corporate data. Cashflow can be quick.

Question for developers - if you're building technologies on other APIs what is your unique value. how do you stop someone from copying you? Community can be a huge barrier to entry. First mover advantage can be a huge differentiator because it's hard for people to follow along after you. Each one has different user needs.

Is Zillow a mashup? Is it a mashup if it's legal? People who take data from various sources whether they are monetizable or not and put it together are mashups. * Resume Mashup - my favorite new term of the conference. *

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Models for Mashup developers to make money
* Sponsorship
* Ads
* Resume Mashup (get bought)
* Whitelabel

Providers Fees
* Fixed Fee
* % rev share
* flat fee

* For those people who are creating a mashup and not looking for VC maybe those people are just earlier in the process.
* As a developer it's cool becuase there's the full range of options available as the developer?
* Whoever has lots of data to turn it into something new and differnet. The provider can screw you as it comes down the pipe. What's the relationship that we have with the API devleoper? A lot of grey areas are here. It would help if there was some intuitive way to explain the license agreement. What should the social contract be? CNet realizes that people are taking their stuff whether we want them to or not.

See you at Mashup Camp

Not sure who out there is going to be at Mashup Camp but I'll be there on Monday and some of Tuesday. I'm really looking forward to some of the sessions about Business Models and Mashup Speed Geeking. I like the un-conference format but to be honest I wish I knew when some of these things were actually taking place!

This conference is a wonderful idea and my only beef with this is that it's starting at 7 AM. Who gets up at 7 AM for a conference?!

Mashup Camp

Ok - this is pretty cool. Doug Gold and David Berlind just let me know about Mashup Camp which is happening sometime in late February (exact timing is TBD as of this post).

Mashup Camp is all about developers using the APIs that have been released and using them to create cool stuff. It's a wonderful idea and I hope that lots of you go. I'll definitely do my best to go and help explain the Aggregate Knowledge APIs. I think it's a great way from a company perspective of getting real world face to face feedback about your APIs and what people want.

I'll also be podcasting from the event and asking people what their thoughts on the whole API revolution are and how they see themselves and their companies embracing it.

Signups are limited to 250 so signup now if you want to go!

Chris

Great example of a horizontal Web Service

Douglas Setzer over at 27seconds has a lightweight web service called Text Disguise that embodies to me what the some low effort, high impact services there are that are just begging to be created. By low effort - I'm assuming that Douglas had somewhere on the order of < 2 developers working on this.

He’s got a CAPTCHA web service that let’s you make sure that the person registering on your site is a real human being and not a computer program. It does this by putting a blurred set of letters up on your screen that humans can read but that machines can't. It’s available as a simple API call and best of all it’s pretty cheap.

It’s clear to me that:

• Many many sites will need to have a service like this, (i.e. anyone that requires users to register should really use one).
• They won’t want to build it themselves

How do I know? I remember wishing that something simple and easy to implement would be available only a year ago. I’m glad that this service has come along and recommend folks check it out. I’ll be sure to use it once my next project rolls out to the public.