Many companies have amazing data assets and these form the core value of their business for their customers. APIs provide the means to create new distribution channels for this data. Specifically, APIs potentially allow distribution to be turned on its head – rather than pushing data out to customers and their bespoke interfaces, APIs enable customers to pull in the data they need and to integrate it into the interfaces where they need it. The real value behind this includes:

• Enableing new types of customers to access the data who are unable to use the existing interfaces.
• Enableing customers to specialize their interfaces to the data – tying them more tightly to the data stream and less likely to switch to other providers.
• Enable finer grained access to data sources for customers and enable new types of service/data bundling – and potentially enable new business models.
• Enabling new potential resale channels for the data – which may be aggregators or multi-data source mobile applications.

As the interfaces to data change increasingly quickly on the web and mobile applications, having an API strategy in place provides a stable platform for new products both from within the company and from outside.

There seemed to be concern on the panel about loss of control of the data or loss of brand visibility. These are legitimate concerns, but ultimately unfounded – since there is no reason why a data company should not put significant restrictions on data usage, branding and resale. The company remains in complete control of the data and can set the rules for usage. In many ways, access to data via API rather than the web makes it easier to control who is accessing which data v’s web based access. Many APIs also allow access to only highly trusted parties or specific customers in restricted ways – far from the extreme of completely open APIs. Restrictions on data access can be enforced either by in-house code or via infrastructure solutions such as 3scale or Mashery.

Another concern raised was that the data provision companies such as Bloomberg also often already do an excellent job of providing data terminals and user interfaces to their customers – and that there is no need to outsource. There is no doubt that successful company APIs often also include powerful standard clients/interfaces – and these interfaces are often important differentiators themselves. These interfaces will continue to be critical, however it is rare that companies are in a position to fulfill every integration need their customers may have, every interface need and be able to reach all the audiences they wish to reach.

The API therefore provides the platform for extensions in areas which may not be high enough value yet to tackle but which add value to customers and may one day become larger opportunities. Such extensions also help create a powerful ecosystem around the data on offer and enable customers to put down deeper roots with the data company.

Obviously an API strategy requires thought about business consideration as well as technical –  but as a platform APIs are likely to add very significant value to content and data distribution.

You can download the Swagger framework from http://swagger.wordnik.com/.

Swagger Framework Overview

Swagger is language-agnostic. However Wordnik (the creator of the Interactive API documentation) has released Swagger implementations in Scala, Java, and HTML5 and client generators are currently available for Scala, Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, and Actionscript 3. Wordnik says that more client support is underway.

• Automated, consistent generation of clean, beautiful, interactive API documentation
• Generation of client code and SDK in multiple languages
• Feeding into an industry wide API discovery language that both developers and non-developers can use

If you would like to know how Swagger can be used with 3scale’s API Management Platform contact us at info@3scale.net

Here is a full list of the demo apps:

• Movable Feast: for making guacamole on stage in real time, with realtime energy use notifications.
• Audit Trigger: quick feedback on whether your building might need an energy audit – built on energyscoregards.
• CleanGPA: trying to conquer energy apathy through healthy competition: http://cleangpa.com/.
• NYC Municipal Building Face-Off: 2 million sq feet of building space – visualising energy efficient and inefficient buildings  http://nycbldgs.com/.
• WattQuiz: the energy equivalent of http://www.freerice.com for energy markets in order to educate user on energy related questions using the Genability API.
• Automatic Wireless Thermostat: using android geo-fencing to control your home thermostat.
• Econify; comparison shopping for energy efficiency, including the calculation of the payback timeline per appliances.
• Watt: assigning a number to every individual and zip codes.
• GreenCarrot: help improve energy awareness using social techniques based on tendril and facebook, including notifications and to-do tasks, http://www.greencarrot.us/.
• 1v99: highlights the differences in income and consumption between the wealthiest 1% and the 99%.
• Mosaic: trying to make solar social - visualizing solar energy conversations and crowdfunding for solar projects.
• Solar List: provides price calculation for solar intallations.
• SoBi – TripWatcher: weightwatchers for transportation.
• Tendril Remote Control: switching in house appliances based on distance from home.
• eMotivator: comparative data for energy usage between friends.

Congrats to all the apps. Ideas create hacks, hacks create solution – roll on clean tech hacks!

• better control over Email Workflow with the new ability to customize all message content
• it is easy to obtain PCI compliance if you charge for your API, because security for handling credit card data has been boosted.

We hope you enjoy exploring the new features and we would love to hear your feedback at support@3scale.net.

Email Templates

Every single email notification to both your developers as well as your admin users can now be customized to suit your unique workflow and desires. The Emails tab lists all potential emails, but many of them may not be used, depending on how your workflow is configured:

Change to Credit Card handling

If you use the automated 3scale billing module, you will soon see a change in the way in which credit card data is handled. In future all requests for users to submit credit card data will be redirected and handled directly by the interface belonging to your chosen payment gateway partner.

We’re excited that we can talk about one of the newest innovations we’ve been cooking up here at 3scale: API delivery over professional global CDNs powered by Akamai and CDNetworks. This means that with 3scale you can now:

• Connect your API to a professional grade CDN at blazing fast speeds.
• Serve content into the CDN’s caches using standard caching controls.
• Have your customers access that content directly from CDN edge nodes without the need for calls back to your origin servers.
• Manage your API Channel with tools similar to those you’re already using for your Web Site.

This speeds up delivery to your users, offloads traffic from your origin servers for scalability. Both GET and POST requests can be controlled within the CDN and 3scale’s powerful management tools allow you to keep full control of API Access, keys, rate limits, analytics across the whole delivery platform.

How it works: methods calls to the API can be cached within the CDN using standard caching controls on a push or pull basis. Keys for API access with detailed usage policies can be controlled from within the 3scale control system as well as auto-generated via the API Developer portal. Apps access to the API via the CDN edge nodes that make calls directly to the 3scale control nodes in order to enforce policies without needing to communicate with the origin.

The big event was the launch of Viadeo’s new API (http://dev.viadeo.com) which allows developers to pull data from the their 35M strong Business Social network (check out their cool developer contest), but on stage you also had Gigya, Context.IO, SimplyHired, Klout and Salesforce + in the audience plenty more APIs with a social flavour (PeekYou for example has an awesome people metrics API).

Whether by design or by chance, the “social” theme really rang through. The demos which impressed most were Viadeo and SimplyHired’s integrations of each other’s APIs:

• You can now pull Viadeo information in SimplyHired when you’re searching for positions – telling you who you know that might help you get that job or tell you more about it.
• Viadeo in turn pulls in SimplyHired results to their Jobs section.

We now take this kind of integration for granted – and it’s a huge value add that profiles on business social networks can suddenly show up in CRM tools, Job search and other places. This feels like the web “should be” – social networks providing the place not only to curate information about your profile, manage connections, but also as a means to push / pull information to the right context.

Klout’s demos of klout score integration were also awesome – showing how aggregate data can be pulled back to those very same types of sources and add value.

Another 3scale powered API in the space is FullContact‘s contact API which gives you great complete data about anybody with an Email address, plus there are others like UberVu and the newly launched YackTrack API. All more great data for the mixer!

Of course there are other social APIs liked LinkedIn’s, Xing’s and Facebook’s to name just a few, but now there’s clearly momentum behind these systems playing nicely with each other.

Check out Viadeo’s App contest to win some cool prizes using some of this data -Just 5 weeks to go!

The spirit is right but the label proxy is a little misleading – 3scale in fact doesn’t aim to be a proxy at all (we call it “proxyless” by design) and 3scale’s architecture works in such as way that it never has to see your API traffic at all or get in the way of calls (no proxies to be seen).

It’s better to think of it as a wholly different type of infrastructure: rather more like a set of services you connect to rather something you funnel your traffic through. 3scale’s plugins allow you to quickly setup a connection to our infrastructure and once you have this us it to:

• Authenticate keys, track limits and enforce policies on API users.
• Track key metrics and analytics.
• Connect to developer portal and associated services.
• Put in place sophisticated billing and payments.

and importantly, this works without needing to pump traffic through our servers (with cost, privacy, latency and other issues that this generated).

Also this connection can be synchronous (as Kin illustrated) with calls going back and forth on every API call or completely asynchronous with keys cached in plugins on the APi side and proactively or lazily refreshed (see the diagram below). This makes is a true “web scale” architecture since:

• You only interchange across the management data you need.
• The API data content doesn’t need to flow through 3scale’s systems at all.
• You can hook up many different physical locations to the infrastructure.
• There is a lot of flexibility in how you integrate.

Apigee and Mashery certainly have good products and services which serve certain needs and the label “proxy” applies pretty well there – but the term is a little stretched when applied to 3scale - think of it as a new type of web infrastructure instead ;).