X.commerce: A boldly open platform & OS for commerce in the cloud »

Today we formally announced our collaboration with X.commerce in providing the API infrastructure for X.commerce, an eBay Inc. company.

X.commerce is designed to help merchants reach consumers at the edge of their businesses - where they shop today - online and on millions of mobile devices.

X.commerce is a great example of a platform going boldly open. Many platform businesses focus on apps and business processes on top of the platform layer (apps on top of an OS, system integrators on top of Salesforce, and so on). X.commerce's innovative approach also enables 3rd parties to plug net new capabilities into the X.commerce fabric from below, making them available for use in apps.

These plug-ins, such as tax calculation, customer support services, or rewards management, will extend the eBay capabilities in the ecosystem for thousands of potential customers and collaborators to take advantage of.  This also includes the potential for capabilities offered by 3rd parties that are competitive with those offered by eBay.

It's analogous to Linux's loadable kernel modules or Microsoft's device drivers - not just enabling apps above, but many devices below that can be used by apps; each device added enriches the app ecosystem. The X.commerce platform begins to look like an OS for commerce in the cloud.

eBay understands that more capabilities plugging into the commerce OS means more apps being built on top. This should lead to increased traffic and transactions through the platform. In turn, X.commerce will likely see very rapid ecosystem evolution and growth. It's a bold move and is likely to be rewarded by the ecosystem and the market. Bravo!

We want to build better tools for API developers. Will you help? »

Apigee constantly strives to better serve the needs of developers and to that end, it’s time for us to conduct a usability review of our existing toolset.

If you have spent time making an app talk to an API, and can come by our Palo Alto offices next week, then we'd love to hear from you:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KZH96KW

If you are selected, you’ll get a $150 AmEx gift card to help offset travel expenses (and a lifetime of gratitude from developers everywhere).

April Fool’s Hackathon London - Recap »

On April Fool's Sunday, we teamed up with Vodafone for our second 2012 hackathon in London.  Apps were built with APIs from Vodafone, Apigee Usergrid, and a number of API Providers including Pearson, European Directories, Soundcloud, and InMobi.

Despite the fact that it was a sunny Sunday in London, close to 100 developers showed up for the event and we had a day filled with talent, enthusiasm, and fun — not to mention amazing productivity. At the end of the day, 17 teams presented final apps.

Best overall app was awarded to Txt Mum - an app built from scratch in less than 6 hours.  Using the Vodafone location API, the app determined when an app user traveled abroad, and then would use Vodafone SMS and email to send automated notifications to Mum. Client-side work was handled using Apigee Usergrid. Check out the presentation.

Best app using the Apigee Usergrid API was given to Groupic. This app used Usergrid to facilitate closed group sharing of pictures, from mobile devices, which could be presented in various ways. The use case, which was demonstrated, was attendees at a wedding all taking pictures and sending to the closed group (wedding party). Photos from the group were pooled and posted on a screen as a timeline.

During the day, many more working apps were created, including a robot running on APIs! There were lots of connections made between developers, and there was valuable feedback for API Providers too.

If you were there, thank you for your participation and we hope you enjoyed the experience. If you were not, we hope to see you next time. It was an awesome way to spend the day, and we look forward to the next hackathon!