What do McDonald’s, John Lewis and Amazon have in common? They’re all companies that were created to take advantage of change – whether it’s societal change, supply chain advances or the arrival of e-commerce. Their founders built visionary businesses that disrupted their respective industries and the established players that had created those industries.
If you chose your PC in the 1990s because you wanted specific software applications (and not based on how much you liked the operating system), or if you made the jump to an iPhone from a Blackberry a few years back, chances are a successful platform strategy won you over.
One of the key observations about the difference between big data sources and those traditionally used by enterprise applications is the strength of the signal. As Anant Jhingran, VP Products of Apigee, pointed out in an interview a while back, traditional enterprise applications use data that has super strong signals, while big data usually has a low signal to noise ratio.
Getting an API design right demands far more than just figuring out which calls should do what. Public APIs — APIs meant to be used by people other than their creators — present a special set of challenges that can inform all API design. Even private APIs often find themselves with unexpected users, and can last far longer than was planned. Apigee faced the special challenge of creating a marquee API, an API for managing its APIs.
APIs — the rules governing how software programs interact with each other — not user interfaces, will upend software for years to come.
According to venture capitalist Mary Meeker, the average person now checks their phone 150 times a day (up from 110 just two years ago). Of those 150 times, messaging occupies 23, time checking 18, and the rest are largely distributed between checking and posting on social media.
However, in amongst those statistics, potentially the most important metric is missing – how many times do we check our phone for a positive behaviour change?