Riding the API Economy Wave

[This article originally written by Vanessa Ramos.]

As we make final preparations for APIStrat Amsterdam 2014 we’re thinking about how the conference has changed and grown in just one year.  Our inaugural event in New York was attended by 350 API providers, and the service providers who support them. This made sense since API adoption was really just starting to heat up. In fact, in January of 2008 there were only 600 public APIs. Though it really wasn’t visible on most tech media radar, by the time our second conference rolled around the number of public APIs had grown to 10,000. The New York event sold out so quickly we knew that people on the leading edge of the wave were ready.

In San Francisco, at the second conference, we were full-on addressing the API Economy with 550 attendees who now included API consumers as well as providers and service providers. This time only 50 percent of them were technology sector leaders. The movement toward the API economy had not just grown, it had spread outside the sphere of technology companies alone. Things were really getting exciting now. We happily added a dedicated track and workshops for API consumers.

Now, on to Europe in 2014 when public APIs have increased to 11,000 in just six months and we expect 300 attendees to come together with tech and various industry corporate leaders who have actively been advancing the API Economy and will share their ideas on how to scale.

So what’s the state of the API economy now and what will we be talking about?  We expect accelerated API growth in 2014, specifically in mainstream API adoption, but also an emergence of more API aggregators. This means API developer tools will be a big growth area, as well as web native technologies like openAuth and JSON, which are already growing at a good pace. Civic data APIs, service description technologies and API copyright issues will also come to the fore this year. Check out more predictions for 2014 here.

In just a few weeks, some of the best minds in tech and business will be taking these conversations further as speakers, sponsors and attendees come together at this critical juncture to work out strategies, provide best practice advice on execution, helping to create what the future holds for organizations of every kind. Some of the topics that will be covered are Financial Services APIs, Music, Media and Audio APIs, Civic APIs, and Hardware and the Internet of Things. The Scaling in the API Economy event will also feature top-level keynote speakers from Raspberry Pi, Twitter, Heroku, Rackspace, Eventbrite, Sendgrid, IBM, and WSO2, amongst others.

It’s incredibly exciting to be on this wave. Join us if you can! And know that if you can’t make it to Amsterdam, these leaders and more will return to share what works, what doesn’t, and help create what the future holds for the API Economy at the next API Strategy & Conference this coming September in Chicago. Stay tuned for details.