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Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

We were walking the streets of San Francisco and happened to witness a street band in the process of setting up shop. On the cue, almost all the observers around the band fished out their cellphones and started snapping pictures and video. Which lead us to ask this question: Which is the greatest camera?

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A renowned photographer pointed out to us during Macworld Expo that the greatest camera is not the one that gives you the best quality picture or the best resolution. The greatest camera is the camera in your hand. Going by that, I guess it makes the mobile camera the greatest camera of our time.

Mobile photography has really blossomed in the past few years with almost every cellphone worth its merit having a camera built into it. We now have cellphone camera capturing with up to 12.0 megapixels. We have citizen journalists providing breaking news of the Indian Ocean earthquake through phone footage.

Let’s step back a little. There are 110 or more million cellphones with camera on them. Add the dimension of them connecting to social networking sites, and that really makes things interesting.

But there is a raging debate as to whether the cell phone camera can really be called a “camera”. Maybe it depends on individual choices. However, from personal experience we have observed that people are passionate about photography from whichever source it comes from.

The sheer volume of photos taken using cellphone cameras makes mobile photography a serious affair. (For instance, our iPhone app Camera Plus has been downloaded 5 million times.) Consequently,the ecosystem around mobile photography is also blossoming.

The range of photography applications in the iPhone App Store is the testimony to how serious mobile photography is. The apps have covered all aspects of photography from the actual capture of the picture to editing, managing and sharing them all within the phone itself.

No Limits for Mobile

Surprisingly, the limitation of the phone hardware here is not stopping the application developers to dream any less than the digital camera manufacturers. If anything, they’re dreaming bigger. You can use multi-shot to snap photos, adjust anything from brightness, sharpness of a photo, and add funny effects to them. With most of the cameras having GPS, users can also geotag their photos with just a click. It does not stop here. You can also instantly share your photos on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media platforms all from the phone itself!

And things have also started moving on the video side. Did you know you can not only capture video using a mobile but also add effects like black and white, sepia from within the phone itself? And of course, you can share your videos on YouTube.

Now just step back and wonder whether you can do all the above from within a digital camera, and you realize that mobile photography might not be that primitive at all. To put things in another perspective, you can liken the use of a cellphone camera to the use of a Swiss army knife. This was the theme around which we built our photography application Camera Plus Pro. Both Mobile Geeks and Kodak have some tips on learning how to use all the tools in the knife.

With all the mobiles around, we can now reduce the disappointment of the sentence – “I wish I had a camera right now.”

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Editor’s note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

It’s 2010 – disruption is everywhere. The pace of technology is quicker and faster than ever before. News of iTablets for touch-screen magazines alerts us that we’re living in a multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-device-kinda world. So how do we keep up with innovation while being mindful of resources and cost-savings?

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Any healthy business strategy in 2010 should include an API platform component in it. Establishing a platform strategy is an excellent corporate tactic to achieve faster time-to-market (TTM) results. APIs do this all while cutting unnecessary investments in time, resources and finances. The benefits of APIs are not only the revenue earned, but savings realized in development and operational costs.

Did you recently launch an API? Congratulations! You have just inherited a brand new customer base: developers. Treat your developers with the courtesy you would extend to any customer of your business. Hear their suggestions, incorporate their feedback and let them know you are listening. Ignore your new set of customers and their needs, and they’ll be sure to return the favor.

Focusing on customers requires an exercise in understanding, segmenting and mapping to help you achieve broader corporate goals. Regardless of the stage of your API platform (planning, building, sustaining) this post will provide a useful look into how to plan for successful developers on your platform.

Define Success, Stay Focused

Value can’t just be perceived, it has to be actual. The API platform cannot stand alone; rather it needs to be tightly integrated with business objectives in mind. A good top down approach for planning your API starts by defining what success is for the company. Supporting corporate markers for success will get you the executive buy-in you need to boost your API efforts. Mapping your success through goal setting and measurement processes keeps you cognizant of both short and long-term opportunities.

Next, align your platform strategy with your business strategy – identify company-wide goals to measure against. For example:

• double revenue for the company in five years
• increase user / consumer engagement by 12%
• reduce partner implementation costs by 30%
• increase the number of new Tier 1 partners by 10%
• increase the number of internal projects delivered by 20%

It’s important that the API platform be accountable to the business strategy, by generating revenue and driving partnerships, within a sustainable platform growth model. How else will you know when you’ve been successful?

Developer Segmentation Strategy

You know the business goals and have analyzed the success markers. But now you need to evaluate the best approaches to achieve developer success within your API universe. Start with a classic business customer segmentation study to identify and prioritize your developer audiences. This will help you formulate a clear and effective value message to encourage more developers to consume your API.

To build your segmentation study, answer this series of strategic questions:

• Do you know who your developers are?
• Do you know what programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Python) and platforms (mobile, widget, browser) your developers are using?
• Do you know what influences or motivates your developer to build on your API? (Money, fame, fortune?)
• Do you know the proper channels to reach your developers? (Where do they live, work and play?)
• Do you know who amongst your developers are the most profitable partners?

Consider both qualitative and quantitative information to inform the decisions above. Once you’ve established developer segments, it becomes easier to tie opportunities back to the corporate business goals. And it’s imperative to consider the available resources (time, workforce, finances) to create realistic platform goals.

Focus, focus, focus. Go after your priority segments first, given the reality of limited resources. This is an important exercise in platform planning that adds communications efficiency, and better overall potential revenue performance of your API platform.

Community Feedback

If you’ve already launched an API platform and have built up a small (or large) developer network, then be sure to garner feedback directly and indirectly from them. Surveys, polls, discussion boards, comments, tweets and social buzz tell you how the community feels about your API, brand and efforts. So pay close attention, and analyze the numbers too. Look into your developer portal dashboards (or reports) to get aggregate information on popular calls, methods, search terms, coding languages and other items that relate to the health and curiosity of your API network.

In addition to the segmentation questions mentioned above, consider your top developer targets, and the resources you need to provide to help them achieve success. It can be something as simple as language considerations.

Build in Success Metrics

As mentioned earlier, the API platform needs to play a role in the revenue growth of the company. Oftentimes, champions of API platforms struggle with proving the ROI of a program since it’s a relatively new channel that has many avenues of use. The simplest and most powerful way to demonstrate the impact is to assess what can be measured, such as:

• revenue attributable to API
• CTR to pages with ad revenue via API
• affiliate CTR on content using API
• number of user of mobile apps built using API

And since a robust, active and engaged API network leads to more creative developments, take note of metrics that substantiate a healthy community, such as:

• number of developers
• number of live applications
• downloads of your SDKs and toolkits

This combination of strategic thought-starters for platform planning and developer segmentation is hopefully a guide for you to get the most out of your API platform. So remember, treat your developers like customers. That’s the best rule of thumb when it comes to creating a robust developer community around your API program.

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Editor’s note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write ‘Sponsor Posts’ and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

This year, the newest top level domain (TLD) to be released for worldwide registration will be .co. The debate continues over ICANN’s plans to create potentially hundreds of new TLDs, and the application process for creating a new TLD continues to be delayed as a result. Meanwhile, .co has quietly snuck up on the domain community and is just months away from release.

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The .co TLD will provide companies with a TLD that represents “company”, which is a viable and possibly even superior alternative to .com. With the .com domain inventory nearly exhausted, .co gives businesses the opportunity to brand themselves online to the fullest extent possible.

Why .Co?

Besides being a great option for companies, .co can stand for community, collaboration, content, connection, or commerce. It’s a short TLD at only two characters long, which makes it that much more memorable. With the ever-increasing popularity of URL shorteners, it will also work well for creating your own branded URL shortener to allow you to control your links.

MyDomain will be one of select few companies to offer .co, and pricing info will be released shortly. Be sure to check back to learn more about .co Domains, and be ready to register .co domains when they launch in order to snag the best ones.

The .co TLD release will follow a fairly standard process along the lines of other recent TLD launches. The Sunrise period for .co kicks off in April and lasts through June. The global Landrush will follow in July. General Availability on a first-come, first-served basis will then begin in the third quarter of 2010. See the .co website for specific dates as the launch nears.

The New TLD Release Process

Sunrise Period: This phase allows registered trademark holders to secure the exact-match domains for their trademarks secured prior to July 30, 2008. Trademark holders go through a process that includes submission of trademarks to registrars that are offering the new TLD, validation of the trademarks, auctioning if multiple trademark holders apply for the same domain, and awarding of domains.

Landrush: The Landrush phase is open to everyone and lets customers pay a premium to have a chance to secure high-commercial-value domains. Domains with more than one interested party will be awarded via auction. The domains that get attention during the Landrush phase are short and memorable non-trademarked terms. For example, something like pizza.co would have high value to a pizza company. That domain has the potential to rank well in search engines and would be a fantastic addition to a company’s marketing and branding efforts.

General Availability: This is the final, broad-release period when all remaining domains are available for registration. Like other currently available TLDs, .co will be available on a first-come, first-served basis to be registered at a fixed yearly cost. Most domain names are still available at the beginning of this phase, with only trademarked domains and the most valuable generic domains being claimed during the Sunrise and Landrush periods.

Have a great idea for how to use a .co domain? Feel free to share it in the comments.

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Editor’s note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write “Sponsor Posts” and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Online, survey research is great for collecting deep, interesting data about your audience. It’s the perfect compliment to web analytics and syndicated audience measurement and can provide benefits to everybody in your organization, from the editorial staff to the ad sales folks. However, it’s easy to get it wrong. In fact, we tend to think that most people do just that. And, depending on how it’s used, bad data can often be worse than no data.

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Most of the time, problems can be traced back to sampling error. In technical terms, sampling is the act of observing a small selection from a larger population in order to learn information about the entire population. In the case of online surveys, sampling refers to how you recruit respondents.

So, here are three things to think about that will help improve the quality of results next time you survey your audience

Invitation design

The way in which you engage website visitors affects the type of visitor you will attract.
There are many important aspects to the design of an invitation, including tone of voice and branding, but perhaps the most important is the level of noisiness. At one end of the spectrum, there are invitations that are too subtle: a button in a blog post, a static feedback link in a footer, etc. These can result in a polarized, self-selected sample.

At the other end of the spectrum are noisy invitations. A typical example is the “TAKE A SURVEY, WIN AN IPOD” popup invitation. Crass promises of compensation can have many unintended affects on the sample and carry a high cost in terms of visitor experience.

In general, the goal should be an invitation that is measured, interesting, and respectful. It should be obvious enough so that every (hopefully randomly) selected visitor has an equal, but not annoying, opportunity to participate. At Crowd Science we tend to use text-based HTML overlays.

Timing

Respondents feel and respond differently depending on when they are engaged. Catching someone in a particularly bad, or good, or busy, or anxious mood can affect the way they respond to a survey.

The obvious example here is Monday-itis. If you run editorial on a website, and your bonus is tied to visitor satisfaction scores, you definitely don’t want pre-caffeinated, Monday-morning respondents overwhelming your sample. Similarly, if you’re running an Apple blog, it’s important to be cognizant of the effect of macro events, like Sir Steve unveiling the fabled tablet at Macworld.

Avoid errors due to timing by recruiting as evenly as possible across all meaningful time periods. The unusual visitors are important, but only in the right proportions.

Survey length

Respect respondents’ time and they’ll return the favor with good data. This is obvious, but it bears repeating. Even the most generous respondents will suffer respondent fatigue given a long enough questionnaire.

The sweet spot for online research is six to 12 questions. That’s long enough to dig deeply into one or two topic areas and collect a few attributes upon which to segment – but well within the tolerance and attention span of most visitors, even without monetary compensation.

Online survey research is easy to do, but easy to screw up. Follow these tips and listen to your audience. What survey methods have worked for you? What hasn’t worked? Let us know in the comments.

Photo credit: Dominik Gwarek.

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Editor’s note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write ‘Sponsor Posts’ and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Over the past decade, the Internet has evolved at a rapid pace, and if you didn’t jump on the bandwagon in years past you may be feeling like it’s a bit too late to establish an online business. That’s not the case, however, and 2010 is the perfect time to start doing business online. The underlying technologies of Internet architecture are well-established and are more affordable now than ever to end-users.

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The last several years have also seen a huge increase in the number of available social tools, web utilities and online services that make promoting your business and being visible online easier and more affordable. The number of Internet users continues to grow substantially across the globe, and there are an expansive number of channels you can use to reach potential customers online.

From an economic perspective, now is also a good time to consider starting or growing your business. The global economy is showing signs of recovery from recession, and catching an economic upswing when growing a small business is always a good thing. Small business loans from banks and other creditors may still be difficult to come by, however, which makes an online business an even better choice due to low start-up costs. In recent history, a great deal of attention has been paid to the massive growth in large social networks, but now the Internet appears to be shifting towards a more local or hyperlocal focus with smaller communities inside bigger networks becoming more common. As a result, small businesses offering local products or services can find a targeted audience of potential customers to engage with.

All these factors make now a great time to start your business online. Follow through on a 2010 resolution to make money from what you enjoy doing by starting a complete business from the ground up, adding an online component to your existing physical business, or just using a website to supplement other income and test the water for your idea. Below are a few steps you can take to get started.

9 Steps to Getting Your Business Online

Find a little cash: It’s probably going to cost a lot to get started with a business website, right? Not so much. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can’t afford to start a business online just because you see startups with millions of dollars in venture capital funding featured on ReadWriteWeb or other tech blogs. A huge number of successful online small businesses were started out of a home office or garage workspace. The Internet is massive, and if you can find a good niche, you don’t have to be everywhere at once to be successful. Costs for getting started with a domain name, hosting, basic website creation and online marketing can easily be kept under $1,000 in your first year of business if you plan well.

Get a strong domain name: If you’re in the early planning stages of your business, always keep potential domain names in mind when choosing a business name. If you move forward with a great business name only to find the domain name is taken, it could mean back to square one on name planning. Instead, keep a domain search handy as you brainstorm and get creative with names to find a great fit. Your domain name will be your website’s permanent address on the web, so it’s important to get it right the first time.

Get Web hosting: You’d be surprised how many people think the domain name is all they need to build a website. What you need next is a place to store website files online. That could be something as simple as basic web hosting or a more powerful solution such as a virtual private server – both of which we offer at MyDomain. There are many other options as well, including self-hosting on your own server. There’s a decent chance you know these basics already, so if that’s the case, make sure to share your knowledge with others who are looking to get started online.

Build a website: There are a huge number of options when it comes to creating a website in 2010. Most hosting packages come with some a website builder that will create a decent, if not slightly dated looking website from a template. If you’re not experienced in web design but want to create a good-looking site yourself, look into content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, or even WordPress as viable options that are easy to keep updated. The best – and not-surprisingly most costly option – still remains to hire a Web design company or freelancer. But if you’re serious about your online business, your website design and usability should be a top priority.

Create an e-commerce strategy: Now comes the fun part: figuring out how to let other people pay you. If you want to have an integrated shopping cart solution, you’ll be able to sell directly through your site and manage complete product listings. However, this type of solution is the most expensive and complex way to sell online, and a simpler solution may be a better fit for a small business just getting started. A great place to start is simply integrating services such as Paypal or Google Checkout into your website to accept payments. Another viable alternative is to use a website as an informational source for your business, but sell through another online vendor like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. A final option is to choose to not sell online, but instead establish a website to promote and market your physical business.

Secure your site: If you’re planning to sell through your website or will even be collecting sensitive information from visitors, you’ll want to look into getting an SSL certificate for your website. SSL encrypts data transmissions to and from your website and is most commonly used to protect credit card and financial data. Varying levels of encryption and visible security indicators for your website are available.

Network like crazy: Traditional networking can be crucial to the early success of a business, and social media can enable you to network effectively online. Talk about social media for business use is everywhere, and there are a huge number of resources and articles available to help you get started. Make sure that above all else, you go where your customers are. Utilize the tools that will allow you to most effectively communicate with those customers.

Track like crazy, too: Make sure you’re using website analytics to track your website visitors and sales. Part of the beauty of the web versus a traditional storefront is the ability to easily track, sort and analyze all of the data collected from visitors to your website. Analytics can help you improve your website design, track your sales conversion, see where you’re ranking in search engines and much more. Google provides some of the best options available with Analytics, Webmaster Tools and Website Optimizer that all provide invaluable data for any online business.

Grow and organize for the future: If you’ve made it to the point where you have a website set up, sales are coming in and your business is growing, it’s the perfect time to make sure you’re fully organized online. Use custom email addresses for your business, and make use of powerful collaboration, calendar and task management tools such as Open Xchange, Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps. Stay on top of the latest Internet trends and changes as things will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future. From there, carry your 2010 success long into the future as the Web continues to expand as a great place to do business.

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Editor’s note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write ‘Sponsor Posts’ and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

The holidays are underway and ’tis the season of flowing eggnog, overgenerous meals, and contemplation of both the year gone by and the year to come. Reflecting on 2009, it’s obvious that there has been phenomenal growth in the business of APIs with recognized sites Best Buy, Netflix, Etsy, New York Times, CBS Interactive, PayPal, LinkedIn, and others keeping busy ramping up their API platforms to extend their businesses in new directions.

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What’s not so obvious is that cool, compelling API offerings are only part of the equation. The true key to a successful API platform is successful developers. Launching an open API platform requires a holistic strategy that includes a value proposition for developers as well as your company, plus an actionable plan for cultivating a community inspired by economic opportunity.

Here we present you with some thought-starters to help you with your 2010 developer community resolutions:

Give the gift of self-help documentation and support

Developers are smart. They are motivated to find the answers themselves. Establish your developer portal as the face for your API platform. Supply effective tools and the latest information about your API to give developers the answers that they are seeking. Always start with a value statement about your platform that answers the question: “Why would a developer want to build an application on this API?”

Consider both new and experienced developers and cater the value proposition so you can provide a reason for developers to build once… twice… and keep on building in order to grow your application portfolio. Your portal is the knowledge gateway to your community, whether they are new to your API offer or seasoned partners who want to get the latest status and release information -“Gee, I wonder when that bug fix will be taken care of so I can pick up development?”

Achieve this by applying a three-pronged approach to your developer portal and community tools:

• Developers go to your forums to search for answers, not to ask basic questions and wait days for the answers. Optimize search and prune your threads so that your discussion boards are a living knowledge base of accurate FAQs for your API platform.
• Always add a status dimension to your discussion boards. Badges, exposing number of posts, and user ratings are a simple way to provide your most knowledgeable and active community members with a stamp of expertise. Offer small incentives to your experienced posters who are willing to handle the newbie questions. Their help will free up your resources to focus on the more complex issues. So keep ’em happy.
• Include an open source dimension to your tools and documentation. Solicit input and suggestions, verify and proof the activity, publish or deny the post, and alert the contributors of the action. Open sourcing allows your API platform to support a greater breadth in coding languages and get updates updated more frequently.

Above all, if you launch an API platform, support it. By establishing the developer portal you are making a commitment that someone on your team will be there to respond to the developer community you are attempting to grow. Always continue to monitor and contribute to the discussions, and provide updates when and where relevant. Stay factual, be helpful, and don’t hit send if you’re feeling defensive. Moderators should be strong listeners because lessons from your community are the best feedback for successful growth.

Marketing is not a bad word

Don’t be afraid of marketing. Bad marketing is a used car salesman trying to sell you something you don’t need. Good marketing is information you need to make the best decision. Developers may say otherwise but they do respond to marketing that gives them useful information. Elevate and showcase the voices of developers who find information about your API useful. In many cases all you have to do is add a dimension of developer participation in marketing you are already doing.

• Feeds, Feeds, Feeds. Customizable, automated, real-time feeds. Blogs, Twitter, and RSS status alerts are simple to implement and create a stream of multi-channel activity that can be maintained with a lean team. Additionally, comments, re-tweets, and @replies are easy ways to track community interest, opinions, and trends.
• Be sure to list your API on ProgrammableWeb, a high-traffic directory and news source for the world of APIs. ProgrammableWeb is a prime resource for developers looking for new APIs.
• Look into adding a customer-centric Net Promoter Score (or NPS) metric to measure your program success. Knowing if your developer community would recommend your service to others adds an important satisfaction metric to gauge adoption and activation.
• Join the events bandwagon. No need to earmark non-existent funds for massive, impersonal developers conferences. Aim for an intimate, well-organized, and focused event to activate dormant developers into friendly evangelists.
• Recognize, celebrate, and reward good behavior. The more positive interactions you can create enables and grows ambassadors who do the job for you. Build a team of evangelists and allow developers to reap the rewards from their hard work.

Provide developers with compelling incentives and data sets to create value

Yes, of course, the business comes first. The decision of what data to expose with your API platform needs to support and align with your corporate and product strategy. But don’t develop an API platform ecosystem built only to maximize value for your company positioning developers as the contributors. All stakeholders both contribute and extract value from a sustainable, healthy ecosystem. Don’t forget to consider the value that your platform will provide to developers. Who are the customers of your platform and what are their needs? What monetization models would create the best incentives? What is the economic appeal of participation to developers? A popular API provides a compelling value proposition to the platform provider, the platform participants, and end users.

Know what to measure and why you’re measuring it

A community for community’s sake is a beautiful idea. But when backed by company resources, the community should exist to create value and opportunity around your API. Have the foresight to build in the right measurement tools to validate the effort. Consider your budget decision makers and track for success.

Start with straightforward quantitative numbers: live applications, developers that signed up for the program, API keys distributed; then calculate the activation rate percentage (number of live applications / total developers).

Identify any revenue figures attributable to your API. Depending on your API monetization strategy this could be through direct sales, revenue-share, advertising, affiliate programs, or another creative model.

Look into positive qualitative feedback and voices of members of your community – posts, tweets, comments – items that can showcase developer appreciation, interest, and evangelism. This feedback should be monitored year-round and shared with the platform team and executives on a regular basis. It’s a human reminder of the intrinsic value the community work brings to the brand and business.

Would you host a holiday soiree and forget to prepare for your guests?

So there it is. Don’t fall into the “build it and they will come” mentality. It’s no fun to stand on the sidelines watching other communities have all the fun; you need to invite them to your developer party! Whether you are newly launching or extending your community efforts, try some of these approaches to propel your API platform strategy in the direction of growth in 2010 and beyond.

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