APIs have been a core part of our business since 2003. We’ve built FlightStats around providing day-of-travel data and services to the travel industry. APIs are the primary delivery mechanism.

Interview with David White, who joined FlightStats in 2007 and serves as the Chief Customer Officer. In this role, David works with key customers, content providers, and channel partners, and insures all are properly represented in product and development plans.

Tell us more about FlightStats APIs
FlightStats aggregates data from many sources to provide the most complete global coverage of commercial airline flight information. With FlightStats® Flex APIs you slice and dice the data the way you want. The APIs are powerful, precise and concise. They are designed for ease of use with REST, supporting JSON, JSONP, XML formats as well as SOAP. FlightStats® Flex APIs can receive replies to their API requests in English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, German, and French.

What API(s) does FlightStats offer today?
FlightStats offers the following APIs :

• Flight Status & Track

• Schedules/Connections

• Airports

• Alerts

• Delay Index

• Ratings

• Weather

When did FlightStats realize that it needed an API?
APIs have been a core part of our business since 2003.  We’ve built FlightStats around providing day-of-travel data and services to the travel industry.  APIs are the primary delivery mechanism.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
There are many things to think about.  I find it useful to think about APIs as a class of user experience.  They are a projection of your brand into the developer world.  So you need to really optimize the way in which developers interact with you from the on-boarding and documentation to support, stability, reliability, and business model.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
We launched a second generation of air-travel related APIs on the 3scale Platform late last spring. We had built our own platform for our first generation. It was time to look and see what 3rd-party platforms could do for us. Our new developer center and our new FlightStats™ Flex APIs are managed and distributed on 3scale.

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
We do >10 million API transactions each day and the growth rate has been about 40% per year over the last five years. Our API program generates the recurring revenue that keeps FlightStats, Inc. healthy and viable for the long-term.

What is your vision for your API?
Our APIs are the means by which FlightStats data and services are becoming ubiquitous. We want to realize the goal of delivering flight and airport data to travelers in every country via every medium through which they require it.

FlightStats is a leading provider of day-of-travel data services and applications to the travel industry and traveling public. The company delivers real-time global flight tracking and airport data services that power many of the world’s most popular travel applications.  

3scale: API Management Solutions

We better focus on parts, which will bring more value to the product rather than reinventing the wheel. And I should add at this point, 3scale contributed a pretty convenient and reliable wheel for us.

Interview with Umut Alp, Chief Technical Officer of Truecaller. Values the beauty of simplicity especially in highly complicated systems of today.

Tell us more about the development process of  Truecaller API
We have developed a very strong infrastructure for our smartphone clients to make number lookups. The only integration effort was implementing authentication and usage reporting through 3scale SDK and build a REST API end point for the services. The real development effort took less than a day I guess and then we have worked on the developer portal pages a bit more than that.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
The REST endpoint which uses some of the authentication/ security and logging infrastructures already used for our own API endpoints coming from our smartphone clients. And we have offloaded the development and maintenance of quota management and billing to 3scale. So for us, it is no new moving parts. That’s how we had a smooth release and didn’t have any problems so far.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Re-use is the main principle for us. We already have a tested and working infrastructure built for all the Truecaller customers. So we are using that in order to serve API requests as well. The only change for us was physically isolating our API customers from the rest of the system, so a possible performance issue won’t affect our API users.

What are the specificities of Truecaller API?
The main principle for us here is keeping it lean and clean. We don’t want to have monstrous API requests and responses coming with a 100 pages documentation. It should be foolproof for the developers to integrate and foolproof for us to develop and maintain.

How can developers get a better taste of what Truecaller API does?
We have setup ActiveDocs for our API endpoints and also compiled a one file documentation for it. We kept it extremely simple both in terms of the number of request types and the number of fields in the response. This way, it is really hard to misinterpret how the API works. Developers can check out our API from our website: https://dev.truecaller.com/

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
Same as above:

1. Find new potential customers

2. Help them to have a seamless integration

3. Get as much feedback from them as possible

4. Improve service quality

5. Start over from step 1

Truecaller is the world’s largest collaborative phone directory to find people from all over the world through name and phone number lookup.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Guillaume Balas, our CMO, talked about API Business Models, about how to define your API business strategy based on your core business assets, and about how to enable new business models for your company by exposing and API. Here are some of the highlights of his talk:

• APIs are everywhere, and they are currently reshaping the web and disrupting many industries

• The value is not in the API but in the organization’s core business, therefore the question to be asked is: ‘What API for my business model?’

• When defining your API business strategy, identify to whom you are delivering value: customers, developers, internal projects, partners, mobile apps, affiliates…?

• Define your API business strategy after identifying your core assets. Shape your API strategy to capture the value most effectively.

• Not all APIs are directly monetizable (as in getting direct revenues). This is only true when the API is the product, or when the API projects the product.

We really enjoyed the event, and we also had the chance to catch up with a lot of friends from API space during APIDays Mediterranea. Thank you @APIDaysmedit and @APIDays2013 for a great event and looking forward to the next one! (Which will take place on June 21^st and 22^nd in San Francisco, and btw, we have a 20% off code for 3scale users and friends, let us know if you are interested in attending).

3scale: API Management Solutions

Spread over two and a half days, the second edition will build on the success of the New York event with speakers including:

• Daniel Jacobson, Director of API Engineering at Netflix

• David Weekly, Lead Developer Advocate at Facebook

• Drew Dillon, Director of Product Management at Yammer

• Jeff Atwood, Co-founder of Stackexchange.com and Discourse.org

• Pamela Fox, Frontend Engineer at Coursera

• Peter Rexer, Sr Platform Product Manager at Box

Sessions
Themed sessions in the program include sector areas such as: Music, Social, Media, Government, Payments and E-Commerce APIs, as well as deep dives into API Security, Scalability, Business Models, Marketing and Methodology.

Ticket sales
Tickets, including early-bird discounted tickets, will be available in limited batches starting on the June 5.

This event is made possible by the generous support of sponsors including 540.co, AnyPresence, Apiary.io, Appery.io, Apiphany, App Developer Alliance, Mulesoft, Parasoft, Pearson, Reverb!, SmartBear, Webshell, and Zencoder. And it is co-organized by 3scale and API Evangelist.

3scale: API Management Solutions

From our perspective, APIs conquer all by making the integration of many different platforms and services possible. It enables computation and data from different entities to come together and work on a collective goal. We believe the world will spin faster as a result of API’s. We have an API first strategy when developing and because of this we have grown much quicker than expected.

Interview with Tom Lee, Product Manager and Growth at Fliptop. Originally from the UK he moved to San Francisco 3 years ago.

Tell us more about the development process of Fliptop API 
Our API has been one of our major products since the very beginning. Our development methodology includes daily stand-up and continuous deployment to meet our goal of time-to-market. We are big fan of cutting edge technologies, like Scala, and Lift. We use Lift extensively in our resultful APIs since it supports variety of Rest Web services, and it is stable, and it adopts View First model instead of traditional MVC model.

Our API has been one of our major products since the very beginning.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
Our API is served with NGINX who connects to 3Scale for credential information as the gate keeper, scala lift web framework running on resin as the major API server, and finally MongoDB as the data storage.

When an API request comes in, NGINX goes to 3Scale to verify the API key that comes along with the request first. Then our web application running on scala lift web framework goes to MongoDB for the information that is involved in the computation, and serve the response back to the user.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Stability, flexibility, and ease of development are the criteria we use when we are evaluating technologies.

What proxy are you using for your API and why?
We use NGINX as our API proxy. Besides its high performance, scalability and predictable memory usage, its programmable configuration also introduces the flexibility that has never been seen in the peer solutions. Also, its user experience is more friendly to us, and it can be integrated with billing gateway (ex. Braintree, etc).

What are the specificities of your API?
The Fliptop API provides intelligent contact management options. We enrich, score, dedupe and clean contacts to make sales and marketing systems work better.

How can developers get a better taste of what your API does?
Developers can go to developer.fliptop.com and play with the active docs and see the flow charts we have created to explain how the response codes work.

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
We are doing some pretty exciting things around predictive analytics and a new integration API. Very soon you will be able to use the Fliptop API to predict which companies are most likely to spend money on your product. We call this the SpendScore.

Fliptop’s Customer Intelligence Platform predicts which companies will become your best customers. Their software combines public web and social data with your CRM and marketing application data in order to score your inbound leads, and identify companies to target. This provides a measurable improvement in sales productivity, and an increase in marketing conversion. 

3scale: API Management Solutions

“We’re all distributed systems people now.” #gluecon @argv0

— Michael Rose (@Xorlev) May 22, 2013

In fact, we always were, but conveniently forget that fact most of the time. Specifically, APIs, Cloud deployments, SAAS and “remote access to everything” make building systems incredibly hard because they are distributed – across organisations. The fact that building systems in which multiple components that we depend on are hosted in remote infrastructure owned and operated by others has been a reality for a good long while. However, the increasing adoption of APIs in particular, simply makes the issues that arise more acute – and we don’t talk about the enough. The theme came out strongly both in John Sheehan‘s Keynote on Runscope:

“Distributed is the new Default” for modern applications – “we’re building distributed systems by not acting like it” @johnsheehan #gluecon

— Steven Willmott (@njyx) May 22, 2013

and in Andy Gross‘s:

GlueCon 2013 Notes: The Free Lunch Is Over, Again – Andy Gross, Chief Architect at Basho bit.ly/16Rt7vg

— Tony Karrer (@StartUpRoar) May 23, 2013

John’s talk covered the pain of working with multiple different external APIs – both at development time and at run-time. Each API fails in different ways and at different times – making even gaining insights as to what might be wrong hard to glean, particular with systems that need to run 24/7. Andy dug right in on the kind of testing needed to really validate that a distributed system such as the deployments Basho – “Concurrency is no longer enough – We are distributed Systems people now”.

The theme also came out in Talks from Netflix, Google and Parse – not only do internal systems (which may be distributed) need to be managed closely: there are now external systems which depend on these and others on these.

In a “distributed” world many things become harder: remote nodes cannot always be relied upon, clocks are not synchronized, small latencies between locations make many algorithms invalid or impossibly slow, many of the endpoints are managed by different organisations – meaning changes are often not coordinated or orchestrated.

All this warms ours hearts as an “old time” distributed systems folks – Internet Applications are becoming genuinely distributed across organisations. This creates growing pains – but also makes new types of application possible. People often ask “what’s the fundamental difference between SOA and APIs? The essence of the answer is, not technical – it is organisational:

APIs are typically designed for inter-organizational integration, SOA typically for intra-organizational.

Even though SOA solutions do get used for the former, this has almost always happened with strong assumptions on the human collaboration around the integration and sense of “shared ownership” of the resulting app – control of the resources involved. With the rapidly increasing number of API integration, this assumption is simply not there. Apps in an API world need to handle being truly distributed.

Vendors like ourselves and new companies such as Runscope, will hopefully start to make it easier for both sides of the API equation to take some of the pain out of providing and consuming APIs. Building genuinely functioning, stable apps across clouds is very hard and we have a long way to go – but we’re starting to recognize and address the pain points!

Huge congrats to Eric, Kim and the team for another great event!

3scale: API Management Solutions

Buildings account for almost 40% of the total energy use in the US; the Panoptix solution is all about increasing options for delivering better building efficiency.  The Panoptix platform is open and we offer APIs so our partners can offer their efficiency applications that take advantage of Panoptix data.

Interview with Jim Schwartz, director of strategic marketing for Johnson Controls, which focuses on emerging technologies and cloud based software deployment models. With extensive experience in high-tech marketing, product management and operations, Jim has held senior leadership positions with Microsoft, Cisco and several start-ups. 

Tell us more about Panoptix
Johnson Controls offers the Panoptix® Building Efficiency Platform to deliver lower energy and operating costs while maintaining occupant confort.  The Panoptix solution provides tools to review building and enterprise performance, pinpoint equipment that’s wasting energy, assess the effectiveness of retrofit projects, monitor and report on carbon emissions and much more–through applications developed by Johnson Controls and our partners.

What API(s) does Panoptix offer today?
The Panoptix API set let’s our partners access a wide range of building data collected by utility meters and building automation systems.  The data may be specific to an equipment type like an Air Handling Unit, or may be more general like overall energy use trends.  In all cases, our partners can access valuable data to deliver actionable insight to our joint customers.

The Panoptix API set is based on HTTPS requests and conforms to the design principles of REST; all requests are either HTTP GET or HTTP POST and return JSON responses. Partners can use any programming language to access the API, as long as the programming language can make HTTPS requests and parse JSON responses.

When did Panoptix realized that it needed an API?
In the envisioning stage of product development it was clear that traditional approaches to delivering building efficiency lacked a range of options for facility managers and owners, so they had to pick and choose among a range of point products. Johnson Controls realized that an open platform is necessary to meet our customer’s needs. By providing APIs to our partners so they can use Panoptix data in their products, we are able to quickly and efficiently meet customers’ needs.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
Simple and easily accessible APIs are the key to ensuring developers actually use them, and of course a developer community is important so that people can interact and learn from each other–and people in your organization.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
3Scale helped us get our APIs in front of developers quickly and help us focus on our core business rather than spending time managing API transactions. We use 3Scale for developer and application on-boarding, access control & rate limits and the analytics and traffic monitoring.

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
With Panoptix Platform Services we have been able to rapidly expand our ecosystem of partner and ultimately better meet our customer’s needs for an end-to-end building efficiency.

What is your vision for your API?
Johnson Controls collects a broad range of building data and the range is expanding; by listening to customer and partner feedback we are rolling out additional APIs on a regular basis.

Johnson Controls is the global leader in building efficiency. WIth equipment, controls, software and workplace solutions, Johnson Controls creates healthy, productive environments, reduces energy consumption, reduces carbon emissions and promotes sustainability. 

3scale: API Management Solutions

Users of Truecaller can share their contacts and in return get access to the collaborative database of names and numbers. It is this unique data that Truecaller now has made available via their API.

A guest post by Truecaller, the world’s largest collaborative phone directory

The Truecaller API, powered by 3scale, makes it easy to connect a name to a phone number. This has previously not been a trivial problem – pre-paid phones and carriers unwilling or unable to share data are just some of the problems. Truecaller has solved this problem by crowd-sourcing. Users of Truecaller can share their contacts and in return get access to the collaborative database of names and numbers. It is this unique data that Truecaller now has made available via their API. The API makes it possible to search among over 600 million phone numbers worldwide.

The Modern Collaborative Phone Directory
Being able to attach a name to a phone number is very valuable. This is especially true in parts of the world that has not previously had a national phone directory for whatever reason, for example due to the popularity of pre-paid phones. Since the data is continuously being updated by the Truecaller community, the API is kept up to date and keep returning the latest and greatest information.

Reverse Number Lookup
The basic functionality of the API is to send in a phone number and get back some data about that phone number. The data Truecaller delivers are:

• Name – the name of the person attached to the phone number

• True score – indicating how popular the number is within the Truecaller phone number directory

• Spam score – indicating how likely the number is related to spam, i.e. telesales or robocalls

The Truecaller directory is built by the Truecaller community of users and those users who don’t like to be spammed with sales calls or automated messages. To avoid that, Truecaller’s data is used for these purposes, and it has opted not to make it possible to search for a persons number based on the persons name.

Get Started
Read more about the API at dev.truecaller.com. Get started with the Truecaller today by testing out the free option or request an account to get access to the full power of the API.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Getting content and services onto connected home devices, tapping into home infrastructure and creating a uniform experience is clearly. The panel covered a wide range of topics from integration with CE devices to business models and distribution.

Our take away from the panel was how key the interplay between device, app and API will be to create this uniform experience. While Apps are typically the element that gains the most attention for in-home scenarios, it’s really the combination of three things which will make the home environment genuinely smart:

• Apps – whether on a device with a screen or not: create a localized piece of functionality that the user experiences – as well as putting the relevant brand name front and center for the user.

• The increasing number of devices: are a carrier for these apps into the home – with Smart TVs in particular rapidly accelerating in adoption but many in-home gadgets such as Fridges and Kitchen appliance become first Wifi enabled and then becoming hackable.

• APIs: lastly APIs provide the underlying data and transaction layer that power these apps in doing their work. They also form the glue that enables a seamless user experience across multiple devices.

In many cases, the in-home experience already spans a multitude of devices from different manufacturers and for different family members – making for a rich but complex environment.

Many of 3scale customers have the potential use their APIs to power in home, personal and devices (from entertainment such as Musixmatch, through infrastructure management such as Johnson Controls and relevant life data such as Yummly and Nutritionix). As the home environment becomes more hackable, it will be natural for custom apps or data from these services to show up in the locations just where they are necessary – the kitchen home screen for nutrition information or a special projection to aid our singing in the shower.

During the panel we showed a graphic which is illustrative of the new opportunities opening up:

It’s also great to see hardware and software become merged with new technology such as the Philips Hue – which is now scriptable and can be connected to events in other cloud services via IFTTT. This means external events (emails arriving, sports scores, the weather and whatever else the user determines) – can be used to change the lighting in a room. While it’s still early in terms of people doing this, a lot of creative possibilities open up. It is also interesting to note that the architecture of the system necessarily means lights are controlled from a server by API – rather than purely locally in the home. While this may create issues (robustness / security), ultimately it also creates opportunities – the ability to keep extending the capability of the system even after bulbs are sold and the ability to keep connecting the app to more and more external sources.

Depending on a company’s focus on the market, there are different interesting trends in the space:

• Becoming a “platform” will be an imperative for most Companies wanting to get traction in the digital home: While there will be some large hardware / device players, it seems likely that there will be significant device fragmentation – leaving many companies the challenge of how to get onto these many devices in order to serve and connect the multiple and varied places their customers need them to be.

• Hardware and Device vendors should look to build their App/Partner ecosystems – and be hackable: many vendors for large devices such as Televisions already ship with significant ecosystems of Apps. It seems likely smaller and smaller devices will be connected and also that architectures will become more generic. While proprietary ecosystems have won the day to date, there is now increasing value in more generic platform capabilities – Ardunio, Raspberry Pi and the advent of in-home devices like Android Powered Ovens since they immediately make it easier for developers to create apps.

• Scripting Platforms reaching hardware will be a game changer: the IFTTT example shows how neatly hardware and software can play together and no doubt we’ll see similar hardware integrations from other integrators (IFTTT itself also lready has other devices available). It seems likely this trend will continue and consumers are likely to catch on quickly if the interfaces are right – changing physical space is so much more intuitive that moving bits.

Together these trends seem likely to make the modern home both more and more hackable and also more connected to the world of data and systems outside of it.

Thanks to Connections / CITA and everybody on the panel for a great discussion!

3scale: API Management Solutions

Our Taxi Content Hub is the place for reliable and competitively priced taxis and private rides across Europe and in New York. Soon also in other US main destinations and Asia. We enable innovative companies to create new door-to-door travel services and mobile offerings.

Interview with Tommi Holmgren, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cabforce.

Tommi has an extensive online business background and has been working at Amadeus before founding Cabforce.

Tell us more about Cabforce
Cabforce was founded by a group of guys who had been traveling for business and experienced the pain of getting and paying trusted taxis while abroad. Our mission is to provide a flat-rate and secure pre-bookable private rides everywhere.

What API(s) does Cabforce offer today?
The core of our service is Cabforce Taxi Content Hub, which maintains the pricing and availability of taxi and private car content across the whole Cabforce network. It’s one source for searching for rates and making the bookings. And there’s an API for these things now available to developers and travel industry partners.

When did Cabforce realized that it needed an API?
There’s a lot of hype around door-to-door travel search. To be fully capable of providing user awesome travel search results, not just from airport to airport, these companies will need to plug in content from different sources including flights, trains, ferries and ground transportation. We saw an opportunity in providing the taxi and private car content to this need. API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers who seek to enrich their apps targeted to travelers with our content.

API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
We’ve been working on our platform for quite some while already with custom integrations to external systems. This gave us very good idea of the true need within the API users. It was also very beneficial for us to benchmark the other travel vertical APIs, such as train, flight and hotel to make sure we make the use of our API easy and familiar for our partners.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
We needed to build our API for scalability and want to control different API plans from the beginning. We follow the ideology of not implementing anything outside of our core platform functionalities, but instead use best available services and solutions in the market to do the job.

What benefits have you seen/ are you expecting from your API program?
We’ve been receiving a lot of interest from partners after launch of our API, and the first adopters are now integrating with us already. For us, it gives us possibility to further improve our core platform instead of spending excess time working with individual point of sales integrations. We believe this will make us grow much faster!

What is your vision for your API?
Our vision is to become the biggest aggregator of taxi and private rides globally. For this to happen, we need to be able to effectively distribute our content anywhere through simple and easy to use API.

Cabforce’s Taxi Content Hub is the place for reliable and competitively priced taxis and private rides across Europe and in New York. Soon also in other US main destinations and Asia. Cabforce API enables innovative companies to create new door-to-door travel services and mobile offerings.

3scale: API Management Solutions