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

Click here to read more

With the end of the month approaching, deadlines for several grants and incubators are just around the corner. Not sure you can make the deadline to have a proposal ready for Wednesday? Well, here are a few new funding and incubator opportunities you should know about too: Sponsor Compute.org Compute.org , a Seattle-based non-profit, announced on Friday that it would be awarding major seed grants to a variety of Internet and software startups. Grants will be range from from $10,000 to $50,000 and according to founder Andre Conru, “Compute.org is far more interested in startups that are able to provide a social and environmental impact.” The foundation has a goal for raising $5 million in financial support by the end of the year and hopes to seed between 50-100 startups. New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center The New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center ( NH-ICC ) is a new startup accelerator in the state, launched in partnership by the University of New Hampshire and a team of state tech entrepreneurs. The nonprofit center will provide some startup capital as well as business and legal expertise and is focused on software, networking, Internet, telecommunications and related areas. The NH-ICC hopes to “attract entrepreneurs from throughout New England to build their startup business in New Hampshire,” says Mark Gavin, NH-ICC managing director. And your June 30 deadlines: Creative Commons Catalyst Grants Creative Commons is accepting applications for their Catalyst Grants through the end of the month. These grants are meant to seed activities that support the Creative Commons mission. Applications due June 30. Startupbootcamp Copenhagen-based Startupbootcamp , member of TechStars global affiliate program, is accepting applications for its three-month incubator program. Companies accepted into the program receive DKK 25,000, office space in the incubator, and access to a network of over 50 mentors. Applications due June 30. Mini Seedcamp London Mini Seedcamp London is a one day event in London – July 27. This will be the last opportunity to apply for Mini Seedcamp, prior to Seedcamp Week 2010 in this fall. Applications due June 30 The ReadWriteStart Calendar tracks both startup-oriented events as well as application deadlines (for competitions, grants, and incubators, for example). If you’d like to add something to the calendar, leave a comment here or email us . Discuss

Click here to read more

Online auction and marketplace eBay announced today that it has acquired the popular iPhone barcode scanning application RedLaser . The application and the image recognition technology behind it are built by Boulder-based TechStars graduate Occipital , who says the application “[outgrew] our basement office.” While the team at Occipital is refocusing its efforts to new fronts, eBay says it will pick up where the startup left off by continuing to develop the app and it’s third-party SDK users. Sponsor eBay says it plans to quickly integrate the barcode scanning technology into its current family of apps across its various brands, which include services like StubHub and Shopping.com . With over 200 million listings on eBay and over 7,000 merchants on Shopping.com, eBay’s purchase will certainly benefit RedLaser’s community of users and developers. Control of RedLaser SDK/API Occipital already offered an SDK which allowed third-party apps to embed the technology into their branded experiences, so if a barcode scanner is all they wanted, eBay could have simply licensed the technology. eBay apparently wants to control that network of third-party applications, which includes other major retailers like Target. With eBay’s past history of questionable acquisitions, one would hope the company has larger plans for RedLaser than to simply integrate it into their line of applications. eBay is providing the resources and man power to take RedLaser to the next level that Occipital didn’t have. In a phone interview with Robert Scoble today, eBay’s VP of mobile Steve Yankovich said the company plans to expand the application beyond the iPhone in order to attain the largest footprint possible. An Android version is coming “in the short term,” he said, and he hopes to provide it to other mobile operating systems as well. He also added that the company would not be commenting about its plans for the future of the SDK and API, but said they would be increasing support for developers. What This Means for Occipital The purchase is interesting because instead of just gobbling up the entire Occipital company, eBay chose to just purchase this one app and its related technology. Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers told ReadWriteWeb that the company wanted to remain independent to continue with its other projects, which means it is likely eBay originally wanted to buy the entire company. “Frankly, we didn’t start this company to scan barcodes,” said Powers. “Our vision for Occipital, and the groundwork we’ve laid over the past year expands beyond barcodes. We felt we absolutely needed to remain a freestanding company to pursue this vision.” As for Occipital, the company, which has been heads down on new projects for several months, is continuing full-speed-ahead toward their next front: augmented reality and computer vision. Powers mentioned today on Occipital’s blog that their next major release “begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital’s primary focus for the foreseeable future.” “The next application we’re releasing next makes heavy use of new raw-video access on the iPhone, and dramatically improves the way people capture 360 degree panoramas,” said Powers. “From there, we’ll be continually increasing the ability of our interface to understand the world visually. We don’t call our stuff AR because AR has been associated with a watered-down experience that doesn’t make use of the most powerful mobile sensor — the camera. Instead, we prefer to call our work augmented vision. Kind of like what Iron Man had for his helmet.” Today, the company introduced a few new members of the team that will be leading these efforts into augmented vision and computer vision. The team has recently added two computer vision engineers and an augmented vision engineer, including one with a PhD in computer vision. The company is taking these efforts very seriously, and should have some interesting releases in the near future. Discuss

Click here to read more

Nimbula emerged from stealth today, and as you might expect with co-founders who developed the Amazon EC2 cloud service, it’s poised to be a pretty dig deal. The new project of Chris Pinkham and Willem van Billjon, Nimbula merges the technology of the public cloud – with all its efficiency and scalability – with the security and control of the private data center. And with such luminaries on board, it’s no surprise that the startup seems to be tackling some of the key challenges associated with enterprise cloud adoption: questions of private versus public clouds, security, and interoperability. Sponsor Challenging the Public/Private Cloud Dichotomy Recognizing the necessity for both public and private clouds, Nimbula seeks to make the two coexist more easily and hopes to disrupt the perceived dichotomy between the spheres. “Our solution allows customers to combine the operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security, and trust of today’s most advanced data centers,” says CEO and co-founder Pinkham. Nimbula plans to make this combination seamless and fluid and supports private data centers that can make metered bursts to public clouds like EC2 during peak times or for specific applications. In this way, Nimbula wants to avoid some of the bottlenecks and siloing associated with private clouds, and also hopes to bring the easy accessibility of AWS-like services to the private cloud. But as Nimbula are targeting industries like finance and health, it’s clear that this agile move between public and private is undertaken with privacy, security, and regulatory compliance in mind. Security in the Cloud Nimbula offer a robust authentication system, with a finely-tuned policy-based authorization. Identity is granular, with control over not just who has access, but what parts of a server and what systems a user has access to. The Question of Interoperability: A Cloud Computing Operating System Nimbula Director, the company’s product, is an operating system for the cloud, addressing questions of security, reliability, flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. Nimbula offers an API, a command line and a web control panel in order to control all the cloud resources. According to Pinkham, Nimbula and a cloud OS will “redefine operating systems and what they do for us.” In the cloud environment, he adds, an operating system does more than merely control one machine. It’s about managing cloud resources, machines, and users. With a cloud OS, Nimbula seeks to addresses one of the major drawbacks to the current state of cloud computing: interoperability. Nimbula is in currently in beta, with a formal launch planned for the fall. The startup has been operating in stealth since 2009 and has received investment from Sequoia Capital and VMWare . Discuss

Click here to read more

Last week on his blog, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz diagnosed ” Second Startup Syndrome ,” a condition that many successful entrepreneurs often suffer from. Second Startup Syndrome, says Horowitz, can derail entrepreneurs as they move from one successful startup to founding their next company. Second Startup Syndrome places too much emphasis on business models and not enough on developing the core product, says Horowitz. The company glosses over important details “assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time.” Sponsor But even without suffering from Second Startup Syndrome, a second startup can simply fail to get off the ground. Markets, technologies can quickly change. Past Results Not Indicative of Future Performance Such was the case with Jeff Ready’s company Volt Capital. Ready had planned for Volt Capital to take advantage of some of the natural language processing technology of his past company Corvigo, a successful anti-spam service that he’d just founded and sold. Volt Capital was designed to be a hedge fund, utilizing some of the AI expertise to analyze the stock market. But due to a combination of factors – even before the economy took a nosedive – Volt Capital never got off the ground. Ready was stuck with a major technology investment that he used to successful launch his most recent company, Scale Computing , a data storage service. Volt Capital had built a supercomputer in order to store and process the information it would receive daily from the markets — around 40-60 GB per day. At first, says Ready, he and his business partners thought they would use this hardware to start a virtualization service. After all, VMWare had just gone public and it seemed a good market. But as Ready started to do some research, he found that he’d be better off working to address a storage, rather than a virtualization, solution. Listen and Learn Although it’s easier, perhaps, to learn from a mistake, Ready says it’s just as important for entrepreneurs to learn from their successes as well. You cannot simply assume that because something worked in one company that it will transfer to another. Evolve your idea “before you write a line of code,” urges Ready. He stresses the importance of doing the right research before your engineers get to work. And while plenty can be found via Google, sometimes it’s best to go to people directly. “Cold calling,” recommends Ready, who picked up the phone himself and surveyed a variety of businesses in order to gauge where to develop his next business. It sounds intimidating, perhaps, but these aren’t sales calls. You’re asking for advice, says Ready, and you can earnestly tell the recipient of your call that it’ll be “the most interesting phone conversation you have that day.” These phone conversations can provide you with a good glimpse into the direction of the industry and into the minds of your potential customers. The conversations can provide powerful anecdotes when you make pitches to investors, adds Ready. And these people make great call-backs when you can offer them beta access to your new product or service. The approach that Ready took with forging the direction for Scale Computing placed a lot of value on being “genuine, candid, and useful.” It seems as though these qualities might be good antidotes to Second Startup Syndrome. Discuss

Click here to read more