Many newspapers still think of themselves as delivering content in a specific format, but some forward-thinking outlets — including USA Today and The Guardian in Britain — are thinking of themselves more as platforms, and opening up their content for use by others via their APIs. Read More »
Tech
Markets with network effects tend to have explosive growth, and part of the excitement driving LinkedIn’s IPO last week comes from investors associating social media with that principle. But assessing the competitive positions of social media companies depends on knowing which network effects are actually present. Read More »
Last week, LinkedIn unveiled an upgraded version of its platform to developers. The professional social network is trying to establish itself as the source for professional profiles, and with 100 million users and an upcoming IPO, what are its chances of finally sealing up this role? Read More »
As we build technology into everything, creating entertainment, recommendation services and applications that can deliver whatever we need at the moment we ask, a new breed of application is being born, and the currency of this new breed of application is the application programming interface. Read More »
You may have heard, a company called RockMelt announced a browser last week, even calling it a “social browser.” Thanks in part to Marc Andreessen’s VC firm funding it, the product got a lot of media attention. Big deal. Browsers don’t matter anymore. Here’s why not. Read More »
USA Today is the latest media company to open up its data via an API, the software interface that makes it easy for developers to use another company’s data in applications. The newspaper joins a group that includes The Guardian, the New York Times and NPR. Read More »
While newspapers like the New York Times are putting up paywalls, The Guardian in Britain is not only giving its content away to readers but to developers, too, through its open API. Developer Chris Thorpe says the idea is to turn the paper into a platform. Read More »
PayPal is opening up substantial parts of its global transactional engine, extending the open platform dubbed “PayPal X,” company executives announced this morning at PayPal’s X Innovate 2009 developer conference in San Francisco. PayPal developers and users now have access to a slew of new APIs,… Read More »
