Roland Hor's Blog: December 2012

Sunday, December 16, 2012

The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs In Tow

This from TechCrunch, with some snippets of wisdom for API Marketplace developers...

Rip Empson
Monday, July 30th, 2012

"We wanted to reach a critical mass before opening to everyone. When you’re a marketplace, you always fight the chicken/egg problem and the last thing you want to do is open up a marketplace when you don’t have enough supply yet … so we wanted to get to a place of infrastructure stability and to a point when the community was starting to become substantial."

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Battle for Your API Proxy

We'll need to keep up on developments here...

by Kin Lane on 06/11/2011

Every Web API is designed to receive requests from and respond to the outside world.

Every day an API can receive thousands or potentially millions of calls. Before the API can process these requests and returns a response, it has to potentially tackle a huge laundry list of functionalities:.....

...

Many API owners tackle all these layers of the API themselves. But there are also several service providers out their looking to do this for them.

Read More...

Entrepreneurial Software Developers and the App Economy

Is it good or bad for App Developers?!

by Joshua Wright 12/13/2012

The New York Times continued its excellent iEconomy series with an article on the job prospects for app developers. The lengthy piece gives a few snippets of labor market data for software developers and touches on the work of economist Michael Mandel in measuring the “App Economy.”

The gist of the NYT piece, and something that Mandel doesn’t go along with, is that the majority of entrepreneurs in the app writing realm have a difficult time making a living — despite all the buzz that surrounds the growing field.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Cleverest Business Model in Online Education

Keep an eye on how this service and model develops.....

A startup called Duolingo taps the power of crowds to make learning a language free.

By Tom Simonite on November 29, 2012

Learning a new language is tedious and demands a lot of practice. Luis von Ahn doesn’t want all that effort to be wasted. In fact, it might be a gold mine.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506656/the-cleverest-business-model-in-online-education/

Welcome to the new world of development

This article offers a good overview of what web developers and product managers need to know in 2013.

IT consumerization is affecting much more than application design and device delivery, moving into the world of development and bespoke application design. If Bring Your Own Device is changing infrastructure and security thinking, what will be the longer term effects of Bring Your Own Developer?

http://www.citeworld.com/development/21110/welcome-new-world-development