Paul Greenwell on the importance of the developer community to SaaS

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Paul Greenwell on the importance of the developer community to SaaS

API Economist: Congratulations on launching your new API program at MYOB. What was the strategy behind this launch?

Paul Greenwell: We've had a developer program since 2002. However, as a desktop product, it was really about how to add on solutions and connect to our core accounting system. That was enabled through ODBC, and we've got about 500 active developer partners that actually use ODBC and write solutions that fit into a number of different spaces.

For example, we have a quarterly business activity statement that has to go into the tax department for tax purposes and is required for every small business. A lot of our business partners don't want to have to write and re-implement that. Over the past 20 years, a million businesses have been using our software.

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James Barrese on how PayPal learned to listen to its developers

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James Barrese on how PayPal learned to listen to its developers

​API Economist: What challenges was PayPal facing with its developers?

James Barrese: I'll be frank. As an organization, we had not been listening like we should have. We were growing so quickly and dealing with some parts of the business that we didn't pay as much attention as we should have. That's changed. So, in the last year, David Marcus has been named as president. He came through our acquisition of Zong. He's a great technologist and a great entrepreneur. I was named as CTO in the last year as well. What we're doing is we're driving a renaissance at PayPal and essentially going back to our innovative roots. And right away we saw we really needed to listen to our developers.

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Roy Veevers-Carter on how APIs simplify the complexities of the airline industry

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Roy Veevers-Carter on how APIs simplify the complexities of the airline industry

API Economist: FlightLookup has been delivering travel data to mobile devices long before the arrival of smartphones. When did you get started?

Rory Veevers-Carter: We have been serving the needs of the airline data industry since 1996. We started out taking airline data and built a dynamic routing engine and turned it into Windows flight schedule lookup products. We've expanded that core based technology to deliver it to mobile phones, originally to the Palm VII. Our flight schedule and our flight status applications originally launched when the Palm 7 came out. We've been in the value added data delivery space for travel information for a very long time.

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Julius Marchwicki on Ford using APIs for better customer experience

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Julius Marchwicki on Ford using APIs for better customer experience

​API Economist: Congratulations on being the first automobile manufacturer to launch a mobile app developer program, announced at CES back in January.

Julius Marchwicki: Thank you very much!

API Economist: What was your API strategy behind the launch?

Julius Marchwicki: The strategy behind SYNC at large and what Ford has done is really to focus on what our consumers are doing. We went out and talked to a large number of consumers. We started to understand what they were doing inside of their vehicles, and what gaps we needed to fulfill for them. That's how embedded navigation came to be many years ago.

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Cameron Hickey on how to win a hackathon and discover art in API development

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Cameron Hickey on how to win a hackathon and discover art in API development

Originally interviewed October 11, 2012

API Economist:  You have quite an interesting background. I love the combination of the artistic and technical. In many ways, you are the archetype of the API economist. Tell us a little bit about yourself, including your stint at the startup, Boo.com.

Cameron Hickey: I went to Bard College back in the '90s. I majored in Photography, but I always had an interest in both political science and economics. While I was there, I taught myself to program and build web apps and I actually left halfway through my senior year. I started working in New York City, first freelance, and then at one small Internet company and then I got a job at Boo.com. I spent about a year and a half working at Boo.com based in the New York office. I worked on a variety of projects, but primarily helping build and launch the first and second versions of that ill-fated website.

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