There is a long list of things people will tell you that you need as a startup: You need a working product. You need a business plan . You need a lawyer . You need a good coffee maker, a video game system, and beer on Fridays. Here’s one more thing for the list: you need an API . And here are the top five reasons why: Sponsor 1. It’s Good BizDev 2.0 Having an API is, as Caterina Fake calls it, BizDev 2.0. In other words, in a web-oriented world, it’s the way business development is done. APIs facilitate business-to-business relations by opening data and systems to business partners, either freely or via a commercial license. The integration with other services provided by APIs makes doing business, in Fake’s words, “much much better.” 2. It Builds a Strong Developer Ecosystem An API allows you to interact with developers outside your team, adding expertise and innovation to your product. Releasing an API also adds to the proverbial tool in a developer’s toolbox. 3. An API Facilitates Data Accessibility Having an API makes new queries easier, making information discovery easier for you and for others. 4. Investors Are Going to Want One In a talk in February at the Future of Web Apps conference, VC Fred Wilson spoke about the “10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps,” one of which was, indeed, a programmable API. “Not all of our companies, by the way, have launch read/write API’s, and we’re constantly hounding them to do that,” said Wilson, “but the important thing about programmability is that when people can add value to your application, they are in effect adding energy to your application, bringing more users to your application, and also bringing more data and more richness to your applications.” 5. APIs Make Mashups …And mashups are awesome. Facilitated by APIs, mashups bring together information and applications in unique ways, expanding the reach of your data and product. A mashup that combines data from Google Maps plus YouTube plus World Cup, for example . A

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The Exceptional Performance crew at Yahoo has launched ” Boomerang .” “Boomerang is a piece of Javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With Boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is.” Sponsor Lovingly hand-crafted with the assistance of the Yahoo Developer Network , the EP team thinks that Boomerang will help reduce the disconnect between push and pull. When we launch a site or write a blog or anything else online, a combination of our experience and expectations give us a sense of how our site will be used. The problem is, nobody is free of the chains of their own objectivity. If you’re an intuitive person, or someone with a very strong point of view, stats can be either a harsh corrective or a pleasant affirmation of your gut feelings. Boomerang hopes to help you see your site from the end-user’s point of view. Among the uses of Boomerang, the team has listed these possible measurements. + A page’s perceived performance – it takes into account the moments at which a page becomes usable for a reader + Perceived performance of dynamic pages + User bandwidth + Component load time + Network latency Boomerang API is downloadable here. Boomerang’s github pag e is here. Knock yourselves out you crazy kids. Discuss

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It takes a lot of data to make Shrek. The big guy has to run, eat, talk. How much data? We’re talking in the order of data centers to process the bits to bring the warm-hearted monster to its animated life. The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days. Sponsor The big question in today’s networking world is how to reduce network complexity and reduce all the power it takes to manage data centers. That’s the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek. Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing. It’s a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur. The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process. The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It’s at the center of the film production process. The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared. Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise. The battle is for the network. Discuss

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Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, and it was there that I discovered some amazing uses being developed using AR technology. I’ve already highlighted how it is being used to help doctors save lives , and more recently how it could be used to level the battlefield for soldiers in the middle east. Another example has an even loftier goal: helping to fight the climate and energy crises and save the planet. Sponsor Sean White , a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University and visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, gave an inspiring talk at ARE 2010 about how he and others are experimenting with augmented reality and the environment. Climate change and other environmental challenges are “slow moving problems,” as White put it, so rich data visualization tools are needed to help scientists make sense of it all. Identifying Plant Species White has been working with botanists at the Smithsonian Institute to create mobile applications that can help scientists identify plant species in the field. Normally, identification requires looking at a leaf, and then flipping through pages of pictures to find a likely match. A skilled botanist can narrow down their search, but the process is still time consuming and difficult. Using image recognition technology, White and the Smithsonian have created mobile apps that can help identify leaves from pictures. Simply snap a picture of the leaf, and the app narrows down the search to likely matches. What’s more, the scientists can make the process even easier by strapping on a head-mounted display (HMD) and comparing real leaves to virtual ones displayed in an augmented reality view. Visualizing Carbon Dioxide Levels for Urban Planning White also had his hand in helping to develop technology that collects and visualizes CO2 levels in urban areas. By rigging together a device that both detects CO2 levels and receives highly-accurate GPS and elevation data, White was able to create detailed heat maps of urban areas and their CO2 levels. Taking that experiment a step further, the data was visualized in 3D space and superimposed onto an augmented reality view, providing a third dimension that takes data analysis beyond 2D maps. White says this kind of visualization helps determine causality when anomalies occur in the data. He recalled seeing high levels in one specific area but wasn’t able to determine the cause by looking at the 3D maps. By using the augmented reality view of the data, it was discovered that the area with high CO2 levels was near a street corner where large trucks waited in line to make deliveries. This type of analysis of the data would not have been possible by simply looking at a map. Finding Optimal Spots for Wind Turbines The third example White shared focused on wind turbines, and on using AR data visualizations to help pick the most optimal wind locations. Using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, scientists can point the devices up at the air from a spot on the ground and watch particulates float by to determine wind speeds and directions. In the past, large towers were erected to detect this type of data, but they are expensive, limited in their range and take a long time to set up. Using LiDAR, which is cheaper and easier to use, scientists can cover larger areas and collect more data and reconstruct it into visualizations. They can then use augmented reality to see this data overlaid onto their real-world view to find ideal spots for wind towers. AR is a Start What else can AR do to help Mother Earth? An interesting implementation I would enjoy seeing would be to create 3D visualizations that help show the slow death march of the climate crisis. For instance, travellers visiting glaciers could hold up their devices and see what the landscape looked like from their perspective in years past – revealing the gradual retreat of glaciers from global warming. So can augmented reality help save the planet? Not all by itself, no. But when used to help both scientists and everyday people better see the data in the world around them, it can certainly be a useful tool. Discuss

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It all sounds good when Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff is on stage like he was today, stirring the faithful with his rousing presence. If you ever get the chance, go see Benioff present. He has a style that’s part P.T. Barnum, part passionate geek. With Chatter , Salesforce.com is embracing the concept of the activity stream. And customers do seem to like the flow that comes with a river of news. Geeks have been shouting about this style of receiving news for years. RSS initiated many of us to the way data can flow into our aggregarors. We first heard Dave Winer talk about the concept. It has since become a foundation element in the user experience for a line of apps such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Sponsor We mentioned several companies in a previous post today that make activity streams a part of its core offering. Blogtronix , Jive Software and SAP Streamwork are a few others that have previously developed activity streams into its infrastructure. So that leads to our question of the week: Is Salesforce.com Chatter Really That Unique? Does it Matter if it is not? Take Our Poll survey software We can’t expect too much objectivity from competitors. They’ve been doing their fair share of squawking today in reaction to the Chatter marketing juggernaut. But it does help to see how they view a service like Chatter. Blogtronix Founder Vassil Mladjov says Salesforce.com is a good business microblogging service but points to its lack of robustness: “….in terms of functionalities: – Profile – Chatter profiles are very basic and lack major privacy settings that others offer. I am not sure how you can customize the profiles in Chatter and set permissions for different fields like cell phones, emails, work history, etc. – Groups – you can only create public or private you can’t even have hidden groups – You have a one-way integration for Twitter/Facebook, companies need two-way integration, so you can share internal information externally as well.” Bantam Live is not so kind, comparing Chatter to lipstick on a pig: “Salesforce CRM has an interface that only the mother of a database technician could love. As a bolt-on, the glossy lipstick of Chatter may help as a overlaying concealer to the core CRM app, but the user experience is still like walking in mud. For small businesses, it seems Salesforce CRM will be easy to use when pigs fly in the cloud. We’re flattered that Salesforce’s Chatter is following Bantam Live’s lead in the small business sector by offering real-time activity streams, team collaboration tools, and social CRM features. And as a competitor, we’re delighted that their makeover is but a fresh coat of paint applied to a vintage CRM system.” Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com has his own criticism of vendors in the space, which he provided as part of an eWeek interview: “The problem with a lot of these collaboration tools is that they turn into Grandma’s attic. There’s tons and tons of interesting stuff up there, but it’s got no organization. You end up having to pay a third-party consultant to continually come in and work with you to make it usable storage instead of just sharable storage.” CRM Outsiders smartly points out that most all enterprises are mostly consuming the data from the social Web. There is little interaction, which calls into question if customers really want social CRM: “….but very few enable a company to transcend the firewall between the “customer” as an individual and the CRM system. Salesforce’s Chatter is guilty of this gap. But so are most other B2B CRM systems. Why is this? Perhaps our reliance on selling “seats” rather than total business value makes it hard to open the floodgates of customer activity into a CRM system. Maybe we haven’t figured out security concerns. Or, maybe the nature of B2B selling, and where social CRM is right now in terms of B2B, dictates that we do not need this type of transparency. Is it enough to have all of your employees on the same page, provide a consistent response to any customer inquiry, and consume data from social media rather than engage directly inside the networks where they are created?” Analysts vary in their views but there seems to be some consensus that it’s not the technology but the Salesforce.com presence and longevity that makes the difference. As Sameer Patel posted on Twitter: “….Also, unique doesn’t always win. Enterprises don’t buy unique or best, most buy good enough. So its all relative…” So, what do you think? Is Salesforce.com really that unique? Discuss

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