Mike Maney

Tag: API

  • The Connected Car Cast 2-14-2014

  • The Connected Car Cast 2-7-14

  • APIdays San Francisco

    Last night, I moderated a panel on the current state and future of the API market at APIdays San Francisco. It was the first time APIdays had come to the States, originating in Paris where the biggest event in its series of multi-city conferences is hosted. There’s a great round-up of photos and tweets here.

    Our panel included TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter, Alex Williams; former ProgrammableWeb blogger and current head of SendGrid’s developer communications, Adam Duvander; and two top venture capitalists in this space: True Ventures’ Adam D’Augelli and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil.

    It was a lively discussion with great debate among the panelists. One topic I’m seeing a lot of the API discussion coming back to is infrastructure. I saw it at Gluecon in May, too. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while and one of the reasons I created maney:digital (well, that and the fact that the girls really love a guy with his own influencer consultancy). The sexy part of tech right now is the unsexy stuff. The tech world is no longer dominated by glossy apps. People and startups (the smart ones) know there’s real work to be done in shoring up the stuff that makes all the other stuff work. It’s not dissimilar to the rebuilding the American transportation infrastructure is going through (or should be going through). And among all of the digital ditch digging is an emergent class of startups banking not on the fixing, but on innovating among and on top of that new API-centric plumbing.

    Sex may sell, but unsexy makes the sale possible.

    (Image shot by @SOASoftwareInc)

  • Gluecon 2013: It’s Not the Things

    It’s not the things. It’s the things that make the things work.

    That’s the core of Gluecon, one of a very select few conferences that are on my must-attend-at-all-costs list. Held every May in Broomfield, Co., Gluecon brings together a who’s who of the tech industry’s smartest people. You won’t find a Zuckerberg, Mayer or Brin, but you will find a Hoff, Merling and Cockroft — the sort of people who are building and running the core infrastructure that enables the world we all live. Household names? Maybe not. But high Q scores among those who follow cloud computing and APIs (and, I suspect, equally strong Little Bird influence rankings).

     

    As I looked through this year’s attendee list (using an awesome app developed by Full Contact), there was noticeable shift from year’s past in the type of developer and company attending Glue. Where past conferences had a healthy smattering of long tail developers, this year seems to have a robust profile of enterprise folks (something I also saw reflected in the agenda). The reason, in my opinion, is that we are finally seeing the enterprise wake up to power of things like the cloud and APIs. But instead of seeing power in apps, like we saw in the last wave, they are finding opportunity in new business models.

  • Of Airports and Thermostats


    Know what’s fun on a rainy Labor Day? Catching up on a weekend’s worth of links from Twitter. Know what’s even more fun? When one of your favorite bloggers writes about how we’re on the precipice of a period when “machines will communicate in increasingly human-like ways.” Know what’s even more fun than that? When a duo of big brains do near instant follow-up posts that build on that thought.

    That’s what happened this afternoon as I first caught Alex Williams’ thought-provoking post on the eventuality of a future where machines get all Facebook’y and build friend lists of their own (“How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends“).

    Which led me (via Twitter) to a post by rye connoisseur, pit master and jiu jitsu warrior Christopher Hoff. In his post, Christopher expands on the sociality of human/machine interaction by positing that ““how humans are changing the way we interact will ultimately define how the machines we design will, too.” In other words, up until now, we’ve been focused on how machines change human behavior; we’re on the cusp of seeing how humans change machine behavior.

    And then one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, Christian Reilly, threw his gray matter into the mix with a post that put real-world context around the discussion. Christian writes that a “colossal, ad-hoc network of sensors” will make buildings — yes, actual inanimate things — smarter…something he’s dubbed “smart maintenance.”

    The idea of sensors everywhere creating a global (cosmic?) data fabric is an idea that I helped promote a decade ago during the early days of IBM’s pervasive computing initiative. Over the past 10 years, its core has evolved into the technological foundation underneath business and society today: cloud computing, APIs, open source and big data. Millions and billions of people and things sensing, learning and adapting. IBM once referred to the server-centric version of this as autonomic computing.

    The pieces required to create the future Alex, Christopher and Christian map out are here. Computer chips and logic are already embedded in everyday objects (and getting smaller and faster by the day). Networks are getting wider and smarter with the rollout of technologies like LTE. APIs are liberating data. And software (and humans) are taking that data and turning it into information. And despite the non-society-contributing, advertising-focused business models of today’s social networks, the personal and societal connectivity enabled by the likes of Twitter and Facebook is unassailable.

    We’re on the cusp of a future where this bouillabaisse of technology and society combine into a single pot. A pot where an airport becomes the social network and thermostats friend other thermostats.

     

    Image Credit: Benedict Campbell. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK

  • Career Update: When Passion and Profession Collide

    Alcatel-Lucent Logo

    It’s interesting what you can see when you look back on what as been close to a 20-year career in public relations. I recently took that trip down memory lane. Here’s some of what I learned:

    • I’ve worked for some very cool, very prestigious companies and clients.
    • I’ve learned from and worked alongside some of the best pros in this business.
    • While I’ve done creative, impactful work on everything from Remington razors to underground storage tank removal, my passion and some of my absolute best work can be found in technology; I like to translate tough, geeky, change-the-world science into language and stories normal people can understand and relate to.
    • I’m a startup guy in a corporate suit.

    Which is why about a month ago I accepted the executive role of Director, Influencer Management at Alcatel-Lucent. It’s an exciting, challenging and wide-ranging role that combines a number of my favorite experiences of the past two decades:

    • A love of emerging technology.  At IBM, I led the global communications strategy for Big Blue’s pervasive computing and wireless initiative. We’re talking sensors and chips in everything from toasters to cars. During my six years at IBM, I also handled PR for one of the smartest technologists I’ve ever had the honor to know, John Patrick. Working closely with John and his Next Generation Internet team, I promoted IBM’s efforts around Internet2 and its early entry into Linux. While on the PR agency side of the business, I lived every computer geek’s dream: working with some really smart guys out of AT&T’s  Bell Labs to launch an embedded operating system called Plan 9 (you may remember the team behind this as the same team behind Unix).
    • A disturbing fascination with infrastructure.  Go figure. I’m passionate about the gear that makes all of the really cool things work. I had a blast learning about and promoting AT&T’s IP backbone before the entire world ran on Internet protocols. I geeked out to things like Metropolitan Area Networks leading the PSINet account in the days when 28.8 kbps was a huge pipe. I’ve been deep in the bowels of PAIX.
    • A need to push beyond the possible. I’ve worked alongside fiery startup CEOs/founders. I helped launch a startup inside one of the world’s largest and most respected technology companies. Both demanded a constant, damn-the-rules, make-it-happen culture.
    • A desire to work with great leaders who inspire great work. I’ve seen my share of good, terrible and great leaders in the years I’ve been in this industry. The great ones are few and far between…leaders like IBM’s VP of media relations, Ed Barbini, and MindTouch’s founder/CEO, Aaron Fulkerson — people you would walk through fire for.

    My new role at Alcatel-Lucent is a mix of each of these and more. I am working with emerging technologies and business models that change how we communicate. I’m working with a clear leader driving the infrastructure that makes communication happen. The work we are doing is being done at the speed and with the style of a startup, yet with the backing and resources of a large, global corporation. We are helping to change a corporate mindset. Lastly, and most importantly, I’m part of a small, tight team being led by someone I’ve not only worked with in the past, but respect immensely.

    I’m excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead…for me, for our team and for the industry we impact.

  • Developers, APIs and Landslide Victories

    It’s getting to be that time of year when pundits start making predictions about the hot technologies on tap for 2010. My favorite so far is less a prediction and more a reality that is happening right now. Mashable’s Peter Cashmore points out that Foursquare is the next Twitter-like social technology to break out, however I think his definition of the application programming interface (API) and its role in Twitter’s (and, eventually, Foursquare’s) meteoric success is even more insightful:

    “This week Foursquare debuted the singular piece that launched Twitter into the stratosphere: an API. This application programming interface allows third-party developers to build anything they desire on top of Foursquare’s location-based social network.

    It’s been shown time and again that once these ecosystems gain momentum, potential competitors face an arduous task. From Flickr to Google Maps to Twitter and beyond, it’s clear that early critical mass — having enough users and applications to make a service invaluable — sets the stage for a landslide victory.”