#busdev

It seems like every consumer web or app company is investing into making itself a platform - taking cues from Facebook and Twitter of old. Well, not Strava, apparently. I just received an interesting email from them:

In previous blog updates, we've discussed status and access to V3 of our API. As mentioned then, we had to make difficult decisions this year about where to invest time and resources - feature development or a full-fledged API program. We have chosen to focus on feature development at this time and so access to V3 of our API is extremely limited.

Any developer who has been granted access to V3 of the API has been contacted. We will revisit our API program and applications from time to time, but for the time being, we have no plans to grant further access in 2013.

As I was working on DICOM Grid, it became painfully obvious that one of the strongest markets for its use, much like the web apps above, is developers creating new applications on top of the platform. That's why so much of our development at DG was to expand the platform, create new services and features that are consumed by developers and underly new applications we couldn't even imagine.

Now that DG's platform is out there, the questions about its API and platform features are some of the most frequently asked in pre-sales and sales engagements.

I think that Strava's investment in a closed ecosystem is an opportunity for their rivals (MapMyRun, Garmin Connect) to be more open, to create a fitness platform to power various applications and to be the underlying data layer for a new crop of fitness apps. I for one would love to develop in that ecosystem, even if the main app is not as polished as Strava.