#apistrat

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APIDays Berlin & APIStrat Europe 2015 Announce Updates to Berlin Program, New Speakers, Keynotes and the SpeedHack API Hackathon

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) March 25, 2015

The APIDays and API Strategy & Practice Conference today announced the publication of the event program for the upcoming “For a Web of APIs” in Berlin at the Humboldt Carre, April 24-25, 2015. New sponsors include Algolia, Cronofy, Runscope, Stamplay, streamdata.io and Twitter.

The program will have various keynotes, panel discussions and fireside chats, before it breaks into three parallel deep-dive tracks. Two tracks cover the business and strategy of API related topics and one track focuses on topics for developers. The various sessions within the tracks include topics such as APIs & Mobile, eCommerce, Enterprise & Enterprise Experience and API Design.

A big win for the event is a keynote by Coca-Cola’s Pascal Morgen, IT Director Germany. In “Why APIs at Coca-Cola?”, Mr. Morgen will present how Coca-Cola solved the challenge of balancing regulatory complexity with openness and transparency using APIs. Other keynote additions include Mandy Waite of Google and Lorinda Brandon of SmartBear. More details on topics and speakers can be found on the speakers page of the event site.

“We’re very excited to offer a final program that covers the most important aspects of API’s” said Mehdi Medjaoui, founder of APIDays. “We cover strategic issues on why organisations need and use APIs, technology concerns like design best-practices, and marketing aspects including how to increase the adoption of an API provider. All in all a very well rounded program.”

Also on the program is SpeedHack, a special format hackathon, made popular at earlier APIStrat events. Fast, furious and fun, SpeedHack compresses clearly defined API challenges posed by sponsors into three hours. Special event sponsors include Twitter, Twilio, Apidaze, Context.io, Cronofy, Stamplay, and streamdata.io.

“Our goal is to balance the needs of people just learning about the space, stay in tune with fast moving conversations like API design, and hypermedia, while also addressing real-world conversations going on in the trenches at companies of every size”, said Kin Lane, of API Evangelist and co-organizer of APIStrat. “We hope to strike a balance between where we have been, and where we are going in the API space, with relevant talks for both business leaders, and developers.”

Mid-price ticket sales end April 11, 2015 at 11:30pm CEST. Register here before that date and save €100. Developers interested in the developer track get a special discount. Participation in the SpeedHack is free of charge.

About APIDays APIDays is the conference that brings the humans behind APIs to meet and share knowledge and best practices with local business and tech communities over two days. Founded by OAuth.io and Fabernovel in 2102, APIDays is now an international series of events that occur annually in Paris, San Francisco, Berlin, Barcelona and Sydney to gather industries, companies and developers to discuss API strategies for a programmable world. http://www.apidays.io

About The API Strategy & Practice Conference Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are changing the face of digital business by enabling new business and technical strategies across many industries. The API Strategy & Practice Conference offers a unique program of keynotes, panels and themed sessions to provide insights into the potential of APIs, best practices, and how to craft a successful API strategy. The conference is co-organized by 3scale and API Evangelist and is made possible by the generous support of the event sponsors. apistrategyconference.com

About API Evangelist API Evangelist is run by Kin Lane, a technology professional with an obsession for Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. His blog at API Evangelist chronicles API evolution and seeks to provide insights and best practice from both a technical and business perspective. He also writes at APIVoice and APIStack. apievangelist.com

About 3scale 3scale provides a comprehensive API management platform that lets API providers easily package, distribute, manage and monetize APIs through a SaaS API infrastructure that is flexible, secure and Web scalable. The platform enables the distribution of data, content or services to multiple devices or mobile/Web applications, and the ability to easily productize APIs. 3scale also powers APItools for developers and APIs.io, the worlds first open source API search engine. For more information visit 3scale.net

About SPHERE.IO SPHERE.IO by commercetools is a cloud-based enterprise e-commerce platform that allows merchants to orchestrate and interconnect individual systems and services seamlessly to deliver a world-class shopping experience for web, smartphone, tablet, point of sale and any other emerging channel, technology or device. Providing all essential functions in the form of a scalable API, SPHERE.IO enables real multichannel use cases with one central platform for all product, inventory, customer and transaction data. For more information visit sphere.io

APIDays And APIStrat Europe Combine To Present Joint European API Conference In Berlin April 23rd-25th 2015

Paris (PRWEB) December 03, 2014

Today, two of the premiere API technology events announced a new joint event on the API calendar for April 23-25, 2015. The APIDays and API Strategy and Practice (APIStrat) conferences will combine to create a single joint European event in Berlin immediately following the AppsWorld Mobile Application Expo (22-23rd of April). The joint conference will feature leading keynotes, panels and in-depth sessions on both general API strategies and practical knowledge across a wide range of industry sectors. The event will also include workshops and a Speedhack code competition, as well as local support from SPHERE.IO, local organizer of the recent APIDays Berlin 2014.

“The APIDays and APIStrat conferences each aim to move leading-edge API knowledge forward – enabling great conversation on what works and a what doesn’t, so we’re excited that we can bring both organizations together at a joint event – combining the great energy from both communities.” said Steven Willmott, CEO of 3scale.

“After two years of APIDays and APIStrat events, it’s clear we share the same vision,” said Mehdi Medjaoui, Executive director of of APIDays and OAuthi.io. “Both help small and large companies understand the technical and business challenges related to APIs on their path to success in this era of rapid digital transformation. I’m glad we’re combining our efforts for this event in Berlin after our respective success last year with APIDays Berlin 2014 and APIStrat Amsterdam.”

“APIs are on the leading edge of innovation in tomorrow’s industries,” said Dirk Hörig, CEO of SPHERE.IO. “By joining forces in Berlin, we are able to bring together the brightest minds in the API space to share experience and fuel innovation in the German ecosystem. ” The conference welcomes new speakers and a call for presentations is now open at http://apidaysberlin2015.apistrat.com/. The deadline for submissions is the 23rd of January. Tickets for the event will be on sale in early January and initial speakers and sponsors announced over the coming weeks.

Information on sponsorships opportunities is available on the event web site.

About APIDays APIDays is the conference that brings the humans behind APIs to meet and share knowledge and best practices with local business and tech communities over two days. Founded by OAuth.io and Fabernovel in 2102, APIDays is now an international series of events that occur annually in Paris, San Francisco, Berlin, Barcelona and Sydney to gather industries, companies and developers to discuss API strategies for a programmable world. http://www.apidays.io/

About The API Strategy & Practice Conference Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are changing the face of digital business by enabling new business and technical strategies across many industries. The API Strategy & Practice Conference offers a unique program of keynotes, panels and themed sessions to provide insights into the potential of APIs, best practices, and how to craft a successful API strategy. The conference is co-organized by 3scale and API Evangelist and is made possible by the generous support of the event sponsors.http://www.apistrategyconference.com

About API Evangelist API Evangelist is run by Kin Lane, a technology professional with an obsession for Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. His blog at API Evangelist chronicles API evolution and seeks to provide insights and best practice from both a technical and business perspective. He also writes at APIVoice and APIStack.http://apievangelist.com/

About 3scale 3scale provides a comprehensive API management platform that lets API providers easily package, distribute, manage and monetize APIs through a SaaS API infrastructure that is flexible, secure and Web scalable. The platform enables the distribution of data, content or services to multiple devices or mobile/Web applications, and the ability to easily productize APIs. 3scale also powers APItools for developers and APIs.io, the worlds first open source API search engine. For more information visit http://www.3scale.net/.

About SPHERE.IO SPHERE.IO by commercetools is a cloud-based enterprise e-commerce platform that allows merchants to orchestrate and interconnect individual systems and services seamlessly to deliver a world-class shopping experience for web, smartphone, tablet, point of sale and any other emerging channel, technology or device. Providing all essential functions in the form of a scalable API, SPHERE.IO enables real multichannel use cases with one central platform for all product, inventory, customer and transaction data. For more information visit http://www.commercetools.com.

About OAuth.io OAuth.io by Webshell SAS is an identity API for developers, enabling them to easily manage third-party OAuth web security protocols in their web and mobile applications. With more than 15,000 developers on its platform, OAuth.io supports more than 120 providers into one deadly simple, developer-friendly API for managing complex security flows, with SDKs for iOS, Android, Phonegap, Node.js, PHO, Go and of course, Javascript. https://oauth.io/

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3scale.net and the API Evangelist organised the API Strategy and Practice (APIStrat) conference in Amsterdam on March 26 – 28, 2014. It was a great, vendor-independent event in the Beurs van Berlage building at the heart of Amsterdam. APIStrat was really nicely balanced between technical, strategic and business aspects. In this post, I would like to summarise my personal impressions and take-aways:

The theme of the conference was “scaling in the API economy.” This theme did not prevail in every session but it was discussed in various parts. It basically, as also highlighted by Mike Amundsen, comes back to an older idea. The idea of scale free networks – and the idea of building APIs nodes rather than API hubs.

Mike also gave a fascinating keynote talk in which he raised scalability concerns considering the billions of connected devices in the future. Developing programs as we do at the moment may reach its limits for this. Hence, Mike essentially suggests an approach by using rules. The way he conveyed that in his talk was very unique and inspiring by referring to the works of John von Neuman, John Convay, and Theo Jansen. Find the details of his talk (including slides and videos) here: “Self-Replication, Strandbeest, and the Game of Life.” Two ideas I take away from that are, first, the best bug-free code is no code and, second, the next big thing is small.

There was one session about developer marketing, which is a topic I personally find crucial and is currently a bit underrepresented at API conferences. The developers are an essential element in the API value chain who eventually bring the assets exposed via an API to the end consumers. Hence, I totally agreed with Ricky Robinett, Developer Evangelist at Twilio, who introduced the analogy of “being Alfred.” That means as developer evangelists we are serving developers just as Alfred Batman's butler served Batman. Andreas Krohn did a probing talk entitled “I hate developers” – with which he basically criticized the fact that in the API outreach too much focus is on developers and other stakeholders (e.g., budget holders who are often not the developers) are not targeted. Finally, another key message was that although hackathons are currently trending they are not the answer for everything.

Mehdi Medjaoui in his keynote encouraged to start defining open APIs. He phrases that as the leap of faith (with a nice analogy to the Indiana Jones movie). He claims scaling in the API economy will only work if there is an open API standard. A first draft of a manifesto subsuming nine principles for open APIs are published on Github. Mehdi also referred to the API Commons as a good basis.

There were especially two interesting talks about API descriptions. Ruben Verborgh raised the problem that hypermedia is not sufficient. It could work for describing a single API, but since we are not aiming for API silos on the long run but for Web scale, and because we cannot predict all possible client functionality a priori, we need other mechanisms. One possibility is to use hypermedia-based self-description for responses and the API itself. Here is the video of Ruben's talk. Another talk that covered hypermedia-based descriptions was delivered by Markus Lanthaler who presented Hydra, which is an approach to describe hypermedia-driven Web APIs. Hydra is based on JSON-LD and the Hydra Vocabulary.

John Sheehan talked about the increase of APIs that are integrated in apps or services and the challenges that arise from that. Another aspect he covered was the benefit or drawback of SDKs to wrap APIs, which was also recently discussed by Holger Reinhardt in his blog post. I have a different view as I do not believe there is a default answer as to whether SDKs are good or bad. In principle SDKs do lower the access barrier and make API adoption easier. But it always depends on the context of an API provider (technologies and platform supported, rate of change, served developer communities etc). You can find John's slides here.

The keynote by Twitter developer evangelist Romain Huet was a spectacular experience in itself. After a couple of figures and use cases of the Twitter API (e.g., predicting elections), Romain combined the Twitter API with a camera on the Raspberry Pi (BTW, every attendee got a Pi in the swag bag) and triggered a photo with a tweet. Not enough with that, he then let a drone fly with a tweet. Actually everyone in the audience was then invited to tweet to the drone. But watch Romain's keynote for yourself.

There was a great panel discussion on the role of Enterprise APIs. This is very thoroughly covered by Mark Boyd in his post “4 Ways APIs Are Being Talked About in the Enterprise” on ProgrammableWeb.

Bruno Pedro's talk was a personal highlight for me, too. He stated that the API economy is still “the wild west, where anything can happen.” In order to counteract he gave a lot of practical advice. He mentioned his personal API tool chain, of which the Postman is an essential element. I have not come across this tool but it seems very useful when it comes to testing web APIs, composing requests, analysing responses, and also allows exports.

Some of the features of Postman seem to overlap with the APITools which were launched at APIStrat too. APITools provide a developer an overview over the used APIs, the ability to monitor the APIs' performance and to react if something is wrong, 3rd party APIs can be debugged and tested, and it creates a Swagger-based documentation of the used APIs. Developers can also inject a caching mechanism to change requests and responses.

Finally, I also found the presentation by Anselme Jalon from FABERNOVEL about API business models very interesting – especially the four Japanese case studies: Seven&i, Omron, Cookpad, and Fujitsu. Vision Mobile's Michael Vakulenko presented what developers really want, the developer pyramid of needs, and their segmentation model (see also this blog post for more). Finally, I liked the talk and demo about the possibilities with WebRTC by Apidaze.

In conclusion, a lot of people from the API community were present and it is simply very enjoyable to finally meet the experts in person. APIStrat is clearly not about products and pitches. It is neutral and as such tries to genuinely drive the API space forward and contribute to the body of knowledge through dialog. This is great.

APIs are marketed to developers through Developer Portals and by Developer Evangelists, but in doing so we are missing a huge market, ie all the non-developers in the world. Why is this and what do we do about it?