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

As a developer, getting the most out of your infrastructure is close to your heart and Kii’s APIs are one of the comprehensive out there for Mobile Application Development (check out their platform here) – and some 3scale technology under the covers makes it even more awesome.

Kii also has a unique long term on it’s ecosystem and includes a VC fund to enable fledgling apps build and scale to reach large numbers of customers. However, rather than fighting through pitches there’s now an even more direct way to get support for your app which is to enter the new ChallengePost powered

Kii Cloud Challenge

The prizes total $50,000 in cash, travel and credits in various categories. There are 3 months to complete and launch your app, so plenty of time to do something awesome.

While hackathons with prizes are becoming more commonplace, it’s great to see one which takes a long term view – something with a longer time horizon to build a great app and a prize structure to help the app take off and succeed!

If you’re promoting your API, also check out challengepost as a great way to run contests.

3scale: API Management Solutions

The last 10 days have seen an impressive amount of change in the API space with Mashery and Layer7 both getting acquired, Mulesoft acquiring ProgrammableWeb from Alcatel Lucent and also our own announcement of $4.2 Million of investment. The moves are exciting and show that APIs are now becoming increasingly important to many businesses.

Some great takes are already emerging on what it means for the space as a whole – see here, here and here and we figured we’d add some perspectives too. In addition to excitement about the space and great feedback we’ve had we also a had direct questions which we can happily answers! In particular, we had a couple of people already asked:

So given the acquisitions will you be raising your prices and changing your product?

The answers? Happily – No and No!

In our view it’s still very early in terms of the adoption of APIs and there is a huge amount for everybody to learn. There will always be competing solutions of many types and that’s a great thing for the customer. We’re committed to always supporting a free forever version of the product and always trying to deliver best, most cost effective solutions right into enterprise grade. We’re also committed to making API management technology as deployable as possible in many different scenarios – so no change there.

At the API Strategy and Practice conference in New York in February (if you weren’t able to attend – check out the videos now coming online – there are some fantastic talks(*)), what struck us most was the amazing array of technical approaches taken. The field is still nascent and as APIs get to scale, meet new use-cases, address varied audiences and see other diversity, there is a massive amount to learn (check out Stripe on versioning, Netflix on Scaling rest [or not] and many others for example). A vendor like ourselves works to provide the best tools and we’ll keep doing so, but we have a lot of interesting ground to cover!

As the number of APIs climbs into the 100′s of thousands and millions there will also be new challenges – service descriptions will become more important, as will trust associated with endpoints, search and automating consumption of endpoints. So we’re looking forward to these.

We’re seeing APIs emerging in spaces as diverse as building management, transport, in-home robotics, healthcare, high street retail, communication, social media, content and much more. Each space is a little different but the fundamental idea is the same: provide uniform, flexible interfaces to the core drivers of business – be it delivering content, controlling thermostats of filing prescriptions.

(*) Also see the twitter feed for the latest videos.

Broad adoption of APIs

So as stated at the beginning, we’re excited for the future – we’ll be publishing more on the plans we have for continual improvement of our products and new offerings. However, you can count on us to keep trying to push boundaries to enable broader API adoption. In so many cases we’re already seeing APIs provide new opportunities for innovation, new revenue and cost savings. We’re confident that enabling broader adoption and encouraging take up will unlock opportunities for many and help move the web forward as whole.

While it’s hard to predict how quickly API adoption will progress, many estimates already indicate there are as many as 50-100,000 APIs out on the web in various forms – many times the number declared as public in directories such as ProgrammableWeb. Incoming requests to 3scale for services also grow significantly each and every month – so we’re not expecting growth to slow down any time soon!

The API Ecosystem

In addition to management vendors such as ourselves, Mashery, Apigee and Layer7 there are also many other aspects to APIs growing healthily which we hope will continue. There are marketplaces such as Mashape, documentation tools such as Apiary, open source proxies such as APIAxle, Web Development environments such as Webshell, scripting environments such as IFTTT, Rules.io and many others.

Also and perhaps most importantly, critical to the API Ecosystem has been the part Programmable Web and in particular John Musser have played in telling the story of APIs, building the goto directory of APIs and charting progress. It’s difficult to overstake the importance of ProgrammableWeb for the API space, in many ways ProgrammableWeb “Made the API Space a Space”.

That’s why the Mulesoft acquisition of ProgrammableWeb this week is a critically important more – no doubt Mulesoft has great plans for ProgrammableWeb and we look forward to seeing things evolve. Hopefully ProgrammableWeb will keep being a valuable, neutral, goto place and we’re exciting about how all the different parts of the API world will co-evolve over time!

Looking ahead

So we’re looking forward to many good things to come and friendly competition in the field + innovations all around! Try out 3scale (it’s free) and tell us what we should be doing to move forward!

Alss, we’ve nnounced the next edition of the APIStrat conference on the 23-25th October, 2013 in San Francisco – follow @apistrat for more details soon!

Looking forward to an exciting and eye opening year!

Related Articles

• “After Last Couple of Weeks, It’s Clear There Is Big Opportunity In The API Space”, Kin Lane.

• “The New API Gold Rush”, Brian Proffitt.

• “More consolidation in the API Economy”, Craig Burton, Kuppinger Cole

• “APIs are Eating the World”, Greg Sands – Costanoa Venture Capital

• “Why the App Economy Isn’t the App Economy, But the API Economy”, Steven Willmott / PandoDaily

• “The Death of the Web Page”, Steven Willmott / PandoDaily

3scale: API Management Solutions

It’s been a big day for us at 3scale with the announcement of our new $4.2 Million investment from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa VC! Those that know the company will be aware that we founded the company to help people open up APIs and create a whole new world of opportunities. This is something we’ve stuck to from then on and the new funding will provide an amazing huge boost to achieving that!

Before talking about what new heights we plan to reach though :), … we wanted to say a HUGE THANK YOU!

Firstly, to our new investors Javelin and Costanoa – Noah Doyle of Javelin will be joining the 3scale board and his experience plus that of Greg Sands from Costanoa will be huge boost to the wise thinking we can do. We’re looking forward to great progress with these new smarts on board! It is always a leap for a fund to make an investment so we’re honoured by the confidence being put in us – especially in a new space such as this!

More than that though, we want to thank everybody who has supported us along the way including our seed investors: Inveready Seed Capital, Tola Capital, Piton Capital and Hard Yaka, as well as government entities ENISA, CDTI and Invertec – Not to mention our Friends and Family investors! Seed stage capital doesn’t normally make the “splashy” headlines as a Series A does, but it’s critical for companies to get working and doing things. So huge thanks and may they keep the seed deal economy going!

Just as important are our users and customers – without which 3scale certainly wouldn’t be here. Companies large and small put their trust in our infrastructure and we certainly work hard to repay. Feedback (good and bad!) has always been invaluable to us and we’ll continue to keep working on product and services to better and better fit needs. APIs are a new technology and there’s a lot to learn both on the operator side and the user side. We’re privileged to be part of some great API programs and play a small part in their success – we’re looking forward to much more of that! Also to add here are industry observers like Kin Lane at API Evangelist – who play a great part in figuring out where the sector is headed and keeping people thinking straight (and not least partnering to organise events like @apistrat!).

Finally, we want to shout out to the Barcelona Startup Ecosystem. Operating in Silicon Valley is one thing, but starting and running a company in Barcelona takes a whole other level of determination. There is little capital and its incredibly challenging to scale – yet there are awesome companies growing up and a thriving scene. As events like the JobFluent Job Fair show – the startup scene is alive and kicking. This T-shirt says it all: “F*ck the Crisis – Build a Startup!” :). 3scale has two centres of gravity – Barcelona and San Francisco, both of which we’re committed to and lucky to call home. We’re Looking forward to people swinging by to hang out with us at our new offices at 450 Townsend in San Francisco and the old ones at Napoles 187, in Barcelona!

We’re looking forward to next steps and thank you to all who have supported us!

3scale: API Management Solutions

SAN FRANCISO, CA – April 24, 2013 – 3scale (http://www.3scale.net), the San Francisco and Barcelona-based API Management solutions provider, today announced $4.2 million of new funding in a round from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa Venture Capital.

APIs are a key infrastructure component for online businesses – powering mobile applications, partnership programs and innovation. Increasingly, as many businesses become more software driven, having a well-managed API available to customers and partners is becoming key to success in the marketplace. The growth of the number of APIs is exponential and forecasted to reach into the millions over the next 5 years.

In order to meet this need, during the past two years 3scale has grown into one of the leading solution providers in the sector. The company’s API Management solution provides infrastructure to manage the technical and business operations required to run a successful API program simply and at scale.

In contrast to other solutions, 3scale’s flexible platform is immediate, self-service and no cost to adopt, enabling any size business to run an API program and scale from free entry-level services all the way to Enterprise grade APIs on a single platform. The solution platform lets businesses build a solid foundation for their API program and scale confidently to serving 10’s and 100’s of Millions of API transactions per day.

The 3scale API Management solution already powers APIs for over 200 customers serving over 85,000 Application Developers, with API traffic monitored and managed by 3scale more than doubling in the last 6 months. Customers range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and technology start-ups, including: Skype, FlightStats, Wine.com, 1WorldSync, SITA, PagesJaunes.fr (French YellowPages), FullContact and Yummly.

“As products and services we rely on for our daily lives—from travel info to e-commerce, thermostats to elevators—increasingly connect to internet applications through machine-to-machine interfaces, the need for robustly managed API’s becomes critical,” noted Noah Doyle, Managing Director of Javelin Venture Partners. “We are proud to lead this new round of funding for 3scale because it will bring high grade solutions to a wide market, which no provider has done before.”
The new investment will help broaden 3scale’s set of services and bring it to a global audience, enabling even more valuable APIs and API delivery by its customers.

More information about 3scale can be found at http://www.3scale.net/. The company is also looking to fill new positions in both its San Francisco and Barcelona offices.

About 3scale
Founded in 2007, 3scale provides a Plug & Play SaaS API Management platform and infrastructure enabling developers and companies to securely open, control, manage, operate and monetize their API to 3rd parties (e.g. developers, business partners, etc). 3scale’s API Management solution is flexible, secure and web scalable enabling the distribution of a company’s data, content or services to multiple devices or mobile/web applications as well as the productization of its APIs. For more information visit www.3scale.net

About Javelin Venture Partners
With $200 million under management, Javelin Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm specializing in technology-based start-ups that leverage key innovations to create scalable, high-growth companies. Javelin Venture Partners’ investment professionals are proven new-technology entrepreneurs who focus on identifying exceptional businesses and management teams, and helping them achieve great success. The firm operates with the culture of a start-up and with an emphasis on being a true partner to entrepreneurs. Javelin Ventures Partners is located in San Francisco, CA., but invests in start-ups throughout the world. For a list of active portfolio companies, or to submit a business plan, visit Javelin’s website: http://www.javelinvp.com.

About Costanoa Venture Capital
Costanoa Venture Capital is an early stage investor focused on cloud-based services solving real problems for businesses and consumers by leveraging data and analytics. The firm’s name originates from the first inhabitants of Silicon Valley, the Costanoans, and harkens back to the origins of entrepreneurship and venture capital in Silicon Valley. Costanoa provides early stage entrepreneurs with a combination of “right-sized” amounts of capital and value-added support from a high-quality institutional partner. Current investments include: Datalogix, DemandBase, Guardian Analytics, Inflection, Intacct, iSocket, Lex Machina, LinkSmart, Return Path, and Risk I/O. The firm is headquartered in Palo Alto, Ca. For more information, visit http://costanoavc.com/
read our blog and follow us @costanoavc and @gsands.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Flexibility, scalability and security are probably the main keywords we tried to keep in mind during the API development.

Interview with Vivien Genet, Senior Developer at Jamendo.

Tell us more about the development process of the Jamendo API
When we decided to redesign Jamendo, we quickly thought that the API should be a priority in our planning: first, because it is THE main way for Jamendo to live outside www.jamendo.com (on social networks, mobiles, etc.), and second, because the migration of existing applications (based on our previous API) will take some time.

To develop the new API, we have used the Zend framework (as for the website) but we made a sub-framework specifically for the API to make it easier to change.

The current online version is the beta version. Developers who have started to program the next version of the Android and iOS Jamendo applications have worked on the alpha release. It was very good training to fix major bugs and unappropriated methods. Now other developers around Jamendo have also begun to use the beta version. All returns should help us to consolidate our API quickly and release a final version soon.

For the developer interface & management, we have chosen 3scale, which provides a complete and easy-to-use set of tools. With the administrative interface, you manage all applications, developers accounts, statistics, plans, rate limits, proxy config, etc.
The integrated CMS allows you to create a personalized developer portal extremely quickly. It’s really time-saving.

Finally, our team has worked on the API according to the “agile” methodology for about 3 months.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
Flexibility, scalability and security are probably the main keywords we tried to keep in mind during the API development.


Flexibility: Jamendo will evolve a lot in the coming years and our API must be able to follow the Jamendo evolutions without reconsidering it. So our API framework had to be really dynamic.


Scalability: our API is free to use and we want to be more and more accessible from any place at anytime, so we will encourage everybody to use it. That’s why good scalability is necessary to stay efficient.

Security: of course, the API must be secured with a strong authentication to access read & write methods. 3Scale is perfect for that because it proposes different types of authentications, and particularly the combination of a client ID and a client Secret with OAuth1/2 support.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Jamendo has already developed two APIs in the past but because we decided to redesign the entire Jamendo infrastructure, we needed a new API adapted to this new infrastructure.

The previous APIs allowed us to learn from our mistakes and this time we have chosen quite a different direction from the previous version.

It was so permissive that it was possible to use it almost like when you make a SQL query. You specified the selected fields, the joined tables, ordering, etc. It is very powerful but it generates problems because of the lack of control over the consumed resources.

On the other hand, we had no authentication system. So if an application consumed too many resources (for example, multiplying the joints), we could not easily identify this application.

Our new API is less permissive but offers more methods for retrieving the same information. The difference is that there is no longer the risk of overloads due to a bad query.

With 3scale, we also identify each developer that is using our API. Knowing who uses your API, how and for what purpose changes everything. I’m sure it will also help us to improve our API by observing which methods are heavily used and which methods are hardly used.

What proxy are you using for your API and why?
We already used NGINX for the Jamendo website, so we were happy to see that 3scale provide a very good NGINX integration. NGINX is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

What are the specificities of your API?
With the new API, it’s now possible to access some write methods. It allows you to access features such as “like,” “dislike,” “add track to favorites,” etc. Many others will be introduced later. 
These methods are protected by the OAuth2 protocol that is supported by 3scale. With OAuth2, an application can be connected to a Jamendo user account very easily and securely for this user.

How can developers get a better taste of what your API does
Our documentation is online (http://developer.jamendo.com/v3.0).

The next step is to integrate ActiveDocs that is provided by 3scale. ActiveDocs is really cool for developers to use because it’s the easiest way to test an API in a complete GUI.

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
- April 11: we launch a developer contest to celebrate our new API (go to http://developer.jamendo.com for more information.)

- Implement the 3scale ActiveDocs.

- Add several write methods in our API.

Jamendo is a music platform that offers artists the ability to promote, publish, and be paid for their music made available for download under Creative Commons licenses.

3scale: API Management Solutions

With an API even more than other features you have to aim for conceptual integrity to ensure the API contracts survive as long as possible.

Interview with Dan Gravell, founder of Elsten software.
Dan is a software developer made entrepreneur. He is the founder and only person behind Elsten software which produces software and services to enhance people’s experience when it comes to digital music.

Tell us more about Elsten Software
Elsten software employs just one person (me) and is based in London, from my office at home. I started elsten software in 2009 and about a year later got revenues to the point where I could leave my day job and concentrate on the company full time.

The aim of elsten software is to make digital music collections manageable. I don’t just mean allowing them to be editable, I mean enforcing constraints so they are easy to navigate, browse, choose music to play and so on. To do this I think you need consistency, completeness and correctness of musical metadata (what I call the 3Cs).

To that end the original product was simply “bliss” (http://www.blisshq.com) which was downloadable software. I was then approached by a few people to use bliss’s cover art lookup functionality. So I decided to move it online as an API which bliss and other clients could use, as a new product.

What API(s) does Elsten Software offer today?
A music metadata and cover art lookup API. It’s ‘release based’, meaning only information about releases (albums, singles, compilations) and actual discs (CDs) can be looked up.

To search for information you can use release and artist names, FreeDB disc IDs, MusicBrainz disc IDs and Acoustid audio fingerprints.

Data is returned in JSON format.

When did you realize that you needed an API?
I’ve wondered about doing this for a while because when other online APIs changed I would have to update bliss and release a new version. It seemed like a good idea to have this feature in the cloud and then I could always update without releasing and distributing new versions, reducing support costs.

The motivator was when someone approached me asking to use bliss’s cover art lookup logic. I realised this might be a good product, so that was the key driver.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
While you need to accept feedback from your users, with an API even more than other features you have to aim for conceptual integrity to ensure the API contracts survive as long as possible.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
I use 3scale to manage user keys and report on usage. It has been invaluable in this, and was a relatively easy integration. Much easier than writing this stuff myself!

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
From a business point of view: new revenue sources and opening up of new markets.

From a product point of view: lower support costs for my downloadable software.

What is your vision for your API?
I would slowly like to move more features of bliss into OneMusicAPI. That would include ways of customising the returned data. For instance, the “genre” for a musical release could be any conceivable character string.

It could be a very specific genre or a very general one. Using bliss, any input genre can be transferred to the user’s “consolidated genre list”.

In OneMusicAPI, you could create the same genre list and all data you lookup could be thus transformed. Other examples would be control over title case, cover art sizes, track number padding and more.

Elsten software makes digital music collections manageable. We have two products: OneMusicAPI, a low cost online musical metadata and cover art API and bliss, which is downloadable software to achieve consistency, completeness and correctness in your music library. We’ve been running for three-and-a-bit years.

3scale: API Management Solutions

API technologies were chosen to make the development speedy, the product stable, and provide vast opportunities for end user.

Interview with Oleg Cherevaty ­ Commercial Director at MagneticOne. Oleg joined the company in 2004 as web designer. He contributed greatly in creation of site content and graphic interface of MagneticOne projects. Due to rapid professional growth Oleg now holds the position of Commercial Director, making management decisions on work optimization and monitoring goals achievement.

Tell us more about the development process of the API2Cart API
The project has been in development for nearly a year already. The API was developed on the basis of Zend framework and with the use of our own API2Cart framework. Also, the development process used advanced science and technology findings such as PC :)

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
Key component of API is work with store entities ­ products, customers, categories and orders, and also providing clients with unified format of data, regardless shopping cart type.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
The major driving force was to get maximum profit with minimum investment. To put it seriously, API technologies were chosen to make the development speedy, the product stable, and provide vast opportunities for end user.

What are the specificities of the your API?
The main specificity is that we work with 30+ popular shopping carts and provide unique integration service. The access to stores is performed via API connection, using API Key for user identification, and Store Key for requested store identification.

How can developers get a better taste of what your API does?
Developers can test API2Cart using our ActiveDocs. The convenient format allows to organize all the available methods and help developers easily explore API, learn to work with it in most effective way.
Also we allow to create a test store and try API method performance to see the live results. Finally, we provide detailed documentation and code samples to introduce API2Cart to the customers in the best possible way.

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
Our plans are usually grand. For API2Cart they consist in support of maximum number of popular shopping carts with all possible versions and the opportunity to work with all valid store entities.

MagneticOne is a company providing innovative solutions for effective eCommerce management. It has 11 years of successful experience in the industry and has won a reputation of reliable service provider. MagneticOne projects aim to facilitate store management and help merchants perform business tasks with maximum efficiency.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Our API is meant to be huge time saver. It is like a universal key to multiple doors.

Interview with Ruslan Savchyshyn, founder of MagneticOne.
Ruslan takes active part in development of MagneticOne project line and general business strategy. He directs the company to the production of unique innovative solutions and strives to ensure functional leadership in the niche of eCommerce service providers. Ruslan believes that high demands and clear goal setting can lead the company to desirable level of development.

Tell us more about MagneticOne
MagneticOne appeared in early 2001. Initially, it was established as a company providing outsourcing IT services, but after some time the founder decided ­ why not start developing unique products? And that’s when rapid company development started.

Now it is hard to imagine a company without its strong team of technical engineers, support and marketing, all working hard to create unique products. Currently, MagneticOne develops SaaS projects, as it is an innovative niche in eCommerce. We do not want to compete with numerous eCommerce software with common functionality.

We strive to provide innovations and help merchants with the tasks they can’t manage by themselves. Realizing that we do something important and help customers to grow inspires us more than any kind of competition.

What API(s) does MagneticOne offer today?
Recently we have launched a new project which provides unified API for eCommerce carts. It can be used in different fields of eCommerce.
For example, if you deliver re­pricing services you can integrate with platforms you work with via API2Cart, retrieve product prices, and process it with your software.

API2Cart can be extensively used by inventory and order management services, as you can retrieve product, customer and order information from multiple stores using one API, process it and pass back the results.

Providers of mobile and social platforms can use our API not only to retrieve information, but to establish smooth data flow and synchronize catalog updates. No matter what kind of business logic you provide the use of API2Cart will simplify your integration with different shopping platforms and help you get the necessary information effectively.

When did MagneticOne realized that it needed an API?
We are not newcomers in the industry and constantly keep an eye on its development. This helps us notice the problems that eCommerce participants face.

New shopping carts appear every now and then, and the carts which already exist tend to develop new versions. Companies which provide services for several shopping carts have to dynamically react to these changes ­ develop integration methods for every new version, supporting the previous ones, develop support of new platforms.

This requires much efforts from developers, much time.. in short ­that’s not cool. And that’s when we understood how we can help. Having experience with different shopping carts we developed universal API which can be used for integration with 30+ shopping carts and their versions.

Thus, we provided one answer to all integration questions.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
There are plenty of different API projects so if you want to win a competition you should stand out of the crowd. Don’t copy ­ create. And make it as customer oriented as possible. That’s why you should consider your target audience and analyze its needs.

Also, we constantly monitor the functionality of our API and recommend to do it at all stages of project development. It is important to make sure your API works otherwise ­ why launch it?

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
Currently, we are using 3scale developer portal for customer registration. We are in the process of getting familiar with 3scale CMS and find it convenient to work with.

What we love about the platform is its flexibility so that it can suit any API project requirements. Also a huge benefit of 3scale is the ability to create and manage interactive API documentation in Swagger format. We look forward to use more opportunities provided by 3scale to use its functionality to the fullest.

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
We have previously used API for other projects, however, with the launch of API2Cart we expect to extend our partnership and discover new opportunities of cooperation. We expect to receive interesting suggestions of developing new applications based on our API.

The benefits of our API is that it is flexible to fulfill different business purposes and can be extensively used in eCommerce. Therefore, API2Cart will bring competitive advantage to us and our clients respectively.

What is your vision for your API?
Our API is a key to successful integration with shopping carts. I think there is no need to explain how complicated the process of integration with each specific shopping platform can be, and how beneficial it is to get a universal API for multiple carts.

Our API is meant to be huge time saver. It is like a universal key to multiple doors. You will be able to integrate once, and retrieve all the information you need ­ products, customers and orders ­ from shopping carts you work with. It will also save your efforts, and make business development in general more effective. This is majorly how we see our project ­ not just as a unified API but as a reliable assistant in business growth.

MagneticOne is a company providing innovative solutions for effective eCommerce management. It has 11 years of successful experience in the industry and has won a reputation of reliable service provider. MagneticOne projects aim to facilitate store management and help merchants perform business tasks with maximum efficiency.

3scale: API Management Solutions

Our APIs give us the opportunity to share our cutting-edge technology with developers to benefit from our vast understanding of the web.

Interview with Nathaniel Zenou, VP Business Development for SimilarGroup. Nathaniel has an extensive experience in the internet industry, where he held various senior position in marketing and business development roles for internet startups, SaaS solution providers and ad networks in the US and Israel.

Tell us more about SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a web measurement and analysis tool to discover traffic activity and ranking insights for any website. SimilarWeb unveils the story behind every website on the internet with a system that delivers insights to help inform competitive analysis and identify growth opportunities online. The technology created to produce this means we have a wide range of APIs based on our knowledge about every website.

What API(s) does SimilarWeb offer today?
SimilarWeb offers two types of APIs:
1. Site content APIs that deliver information about various aspects of any website including its category, tags, similar sites and possibly adult classification.
2. Web measurement APIs that deliver data on the ranking of a website such as global ranking, country ranking and category ranking.

When did SimilarWeb realized that it needed an API?
Our wealth of data and web understanding put us in a position where we can offer a great range of APIs. With millions of website visitors and plugin, we are able to gain insights to have a better understanding of the web. We created our APIs to give developers the ability to use those insights to enhance their sites or mobile apps.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
1. It is really important to research the market to find out if there are similar APIs you’re competing against or if there’s an existing demand for a brand new API.
2. Offering APIs to the developer community, in addition to your main product, requires full operational attention. Using a platform that makes it easy for API providers to interact with developers in order to test, purchase and use your APIs is crucial.
3. Remember that your API target audience is the developers’ community, making it crucial to communicate the value, purpose and benefits of your technology in a clear and straightforward fashion.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
3scale offers us a great, consolidated platform to manage the entire cycle from lead generation to sales all in one simple solution. The platform is purpose-built to help developers with all their requirements such as a personal dashboard, documentation, interactive console, FAQs, and more. Being busy running other operations within our company, I find it very helpful to offer most of our API solution in a standalone self-service platform.

What benefits have you seen/are you expecting from your API program?
SimilarSites and SimilarWeb are big internet brands with millions users every month and different revenue streams. We’re expecting our API program to help us manage a large portfolio of clients efficiently, distribute our brand and technology and help us help users measure the web efficiently.

What is your vision for your API?
We want to be able to help any developer that needs to enrich their product with intelligence about any website. We will be coming out with new, enhanced APIs in the close future, so stay tuned!

SimilarGroup is a global leader in finding and interpreting online information with simple technology for Internet users to experience the very best that the web has to offer.

3scale: API Management Solutions