Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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At Apigee, we observe common patterns in API programs that succeed – in planning, management, and organization. Those that fail hit common pitfalls in these categories as well. So we have developed a nine-box model for API program management that helps track how both strategy and execution must come together to build a successful API effort.

Strategy: Know your market segment and channel partners (developers)

1. Market segment. An API should be something that extends or accelerates the existing core business into a new part of the market. This may have been a segment that was previously unaddressable, or it may be a segment that is under attack. Without a clear picture of the market result that the company wants to produce, the API program will not only be unfocused, but immeasurable in the company’s standard key performance indicators.
Takeaway: Specify the segment(s) to target and the standard key performance indicators the API program should change.
2. Channel model. An API program should incent third parties to adopt the API. The strongest reason to adopt an API is to make money. Given the segment targeted in the first step, what drives the developers that are your channel partners? If developers are building an app, their model may be app sales (including in-app purchases). If the developers will drive revenue for your company, then their model should be affiliate royalties. If the developers’ model is advertising then take some of the money you would have spent on web advertising and pay developers directly for promoting your brand in their app. If the developers already have a strong model but need more market awareness, then use your properties (advertising, branding, and PR) to extend your developers’ reach. Takeaway: Understand the business model of the targeted channel and ensure that the API program can contribute to it.
3. Industry goal. An API should have a clear industry-level goal of either being a true platform or of serving existing partners. Building a dominant platform such as Amazon Web Services, Twitter, or eBay requires tradeoffs in favor of openness, interoperability, and onboarding. When your goal is tens or hundreds of thousands of developers, you must cover a broad set of functions, use security models that are easy to understand, and deliver world-class self-service (from sign-up to documentation to support). Building a partner channel requires completeness in specific use cases, partner support, and business process. Partner channels typically have only hundreds to thousands of developers so security can be more customized and support can be hands-on. However, these developers won’t work to fill in gaps in your API and you must therefore expose entire processes (i.e. order-to-cash, trouble-to-resolution).
Takeaway: Decide whether you are targeting the platform or the partner model, and be consistent with that choice.

Execution: Plan, Manage, Organize

1. Planning. Determine and document what will be accomplished for the segment, channel, or industry. Define requirements at the business, partner and technical levels.
2. Management. Establish measurable dimensions of execution, rhythm of reporting, and key actions. Establish a common dashboard across the project including the key performance indicators and component metrics, executive reviews, and executive sponsor.
3. Organization. A strategy area without a leader will fail. Grant yours the authority, support, and appropriate staffing to win.

This results in the following nine-box model for executing an API program. This assumes that the channel is developers but should be modified to match the way that your business needs to define the channel.

The top-left box should pull all of the others. And API programs’ key performance indicators should align with existing corporate business key performance indicators. With this framework in mind, the most common pitfalls in API programs we observe are a lack of a business goal and a lack of a channel leader.

Without a business goal and attendant core performance indicators the program will fail – because it’s not seen as a business or an ongoing program, but as a side project, solely led by engineering. But APIs are in fact lines of business in their own right – and companies have to manage them as such. Without this alignment – the team will get pulled in different directions, or company focus, funding, and commitment will falter.

Similarly, the lack of a channel leader ensures that the program will fail – because the channel itself is not understood. An effective leader for the developer channel understands both developers and business and is a full peer to the engineering and business leader. In many cases the de facto leader for a developer channel is a community manager, developer advocate, or API evangelist. Sometimes this person doesn’t exist as a full-time role, and in other failure cases the position is not granted the right level of authority. We will see this role become more understood in the coming year – especially among companies that have successful API programs.

Good luck in your API program, and let me know in the comments if you have questions based on the model above, or want to suggest further articles on API strategy and execution.

Sam Ramji is Vice President of Strategy at Apigee, a company that manages APIs. Prior to Apigee, Ramji led open source strategy across Microsoft.

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The surprising aspect of open source is not its existence, but its success. People do things for free all the time. Among other things, there is no shortage of people willing to share their videos on the web. However, despite the availability of free videos, viewers are often willing to pay money to watch films made by professionals. Professional producers of films in turn usually make full use of copyright laws. In contrast, in many software domains, open source solutions are preferred. The important question about open source is therefore not “Why do people contribute to a project like Apache?” but rather, “Why can’t companies create proprietary products that can beat Apache on the market?”

The reason is based on what economists call “the hold up problem.” When a business relies on assets owned by another party, it may become dependent on that party’s cooperation in the future. In this situation, the party with ownership of a key resource may gain the ability to “hold up” its partner, demanding an unreasonably high price. Hold up becomes a problem especially when a business needs to make large capital investments that assume future cooperation from the owner of a complementary asset.

The hold up problem is particularly severe in the IT sector. Building an Internet company on a foundation consisting of proprietary software owned by others is akin to building a house without owning the land under it. When software is sold in binary form, the buyer is subject to hold up by the vendor; if the software needs to be changed in the future, such changes can only be done with the cooperation of the original vendor at the price that the original vendor demands. By relying on open source, a company can invest in developing its product without fear of being held up down the road. Therefore, open source is an economically powerful solution to the hold up problem.

This holds true even when an open source solution is originally not as good as a proprietary alternative. A technology company using an open source solution benefits from being able to make large complementary investments (and reap of the corresponding efficiencies) without fear of hold up. For example, Facebook has relied heavily on PHP in building its products. When PHP didn’t meet their needs, they fixed it.

Programming languages and software development platforms are particularly at risk of hold up. Software written in a particular language is only useful in combination with a programming language interpreter. Such software presents an investment that could easily be lost if its use depends on future cooperation of the owner of the interpreter. For this reason, software development platforms are a niche where open source has been most successful.

Flash is a proprietary software development platform and products built on Flash are at risk of hold ups. The recent attacks on Flash, most notably from Apple, are therefore not surprising. Apple is heavily investing in its iPad ecosystem. If software written for the iPad makes use of Flash, Apple’s ability to profit from its investments would require future cooperation of Adobe. Banishing Flash from the iPad now avoids future hold up. With the recent release of the WebM project, Google has joined the campaign to replace Flash with open source alternatives. (Unlike Apple’s alternatives to Flash, WebM promises a fully open source solution for web video).

It may seem ironic that the Flash protest has been instigated by Apple – the owner of one of the most closed development platforms today – but it’s hardly surprising. Actors who control valuable resources often stand to benefit most from the openness of complementary products. It remains to be seen, however, whether Apple’s own closed platform will continue to be successful in the face of open source alternatives.

Michael Schwarz is the principal scientist at Yahoo Labs and Yuri Takhteyev is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto School of Information.

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By Stephen O’Grady

For years following the introduction and popularization of instant-messaging technologies in the consumer space, it was not uncommon for CIOs and IT managers to be entirely unaware of IM’s widespread adoption and employment within the very enterprises they managed.

But the combination of high-value yet freely available technologies proved irresistible for organizations of all shapes and sizes, and whether those in charge liked it or not, IM grew into a vital communications channel. It grew, in fact, like a weed — much like the growth of open source.

Contrary to published reports and popular opinion alike, the most important impact of open source on the enterprise has not been on pricing. Even though it does exert downward price pressures in markets where it has a credible offering, and even though it does — as we’ll see in a moment — alter the economics of said markets, open source applications that run in production within the enterprise are rarely “free” in a cost sense.

Nor should the primary focus be on code quality. With the code available for anyone to see and critique, it does encourage quality development practices and compel even closed source alternatives to keep up. Still, it’s difficult to quantify this value in any meaningful way.

No, the single most important impact of open source upon the enterprise has been the removal of barriers to entry and adoption, much as instant messaging and other consumer technologies before it.

Consider that just a few short years ago, virtually any enterprise development project required not only bodies but a budget — a significant budget, one that provided development tools for developers, databases for the data, application servers for the applications, and operating system licenses on which all of them would run. Today, all of these can be had at no cost, and with no budget. Budget may become a factor when the end result of the developers’ labor is deployed to production, but the software costs for pilot projects or departmental applications is — or at least can be — zero.

More importantly, developers no longer require permission or approval for their infrastructure. They have been emancipated, in a very real sense, from the oversight implicit in for-pay infrastructures. Developers, in other words, are in charge in a way that would have been impossible prior to the introduction of open source.

The important role that open source assets such as the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP, Python and Perl languages — which together are commonly referred to as the LAMP stack — play amongst major Web companies such as Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO) has been well documented. What is perhaps less well understood is just how important these are to the more traditional enterprise. All of the above play vital parts in businesses all over the world — yours included, most likely.

None of those projects, however, became as popular as they are today because of management, or analysts, or the media. These components were popularized by the volume of developers that used them, and used them because they could — because they’re free and open source, and therefore there were no barriers to entry to doing so.

Open source has fundamentally altered the process of procurement, evaluation and deployment by empowering individual developers and architects. Instead of fighting this trend, CIOs and other technology executives would be better served by embracing it. Work closely with your developers to get an idea of what they’re using to solve business problems, because it’s highly likely that you’ll be writing checks for commercial support in the near future.

Stephen O’Grady is a principal analyst with the research group RedMonk.

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[via MobileRead]

NOTE: The Nova5000 runs Windows CE.NET so it is technically not a "real" Tablet PC.  jk

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For the detail people, the new fifth generation iPod are thinner than previous versions, sport a 320×240 pixel screen on a 2.5” display and can decode MPEG-4 and H.264 at up to 30fps and has video out.  There is a 30GB and 60GB model priced at $299 and $399 respectively.

[via everyone :)]

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From the NYTimes Article: "As part of that litigation, NTP, whose only assets are wireless e-mail related patents, had been granted an injunction banning the sale of BlackBerry devices in the United States and forcing Research in Motion to stop providing e-mail services to all American customers except government account holders. While the court declined Research in Motion’s request for a complete rehearing by all 12 of its judges, it did order the panel of three judges to review some aspects of NTP’s patent claims." [via /.]

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[via The Register]

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