Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Just for fun, we’ve begun encoding our RSS story feed with the latitude and longitude of the companies mentioned in the stories. So, you can now see our RSS feed geographically on, for example, Google maps (go to: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://www.socaltech.com/news/news.rss).  You will see each of our stories overlaid on a map, updated in real time.

Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference is happening today up in San Francisco, here’s the local startups I’ve seen so far on the list:

• mEgo (Los Angeles, social networking)
• DocStoc (Los Angeles, document sharing)
• App2You (La Jolla, hosted software)
• (Updated) Metaplace, aka Areae (San Diego, massively multiplayer software)
• (Updated) Orgoo (Los Angeles, mobile webmail)

Elsewhere on the web in the last week:

• LA’s Docstoc raises a small venture round (VentureBeat)
• Listphile: Lists on Speed (TechCrunch)

When you start to see a venture capitalist and an Internet publisher debate about an “API” and its importance to a company, you suddenly realize that there’s some silliness afoot in the world when an “API”– short for Application Programming Interface — is the latest buzzword. Perhaps it’s all been driven by the hype over Facebook’s API for third party developers, but suddenly everyone is talking about how having an API is the “next big thing.”

Folks, maybe it’s just the software engineer in me talking (having spent many many years developing software applications, sitting in standards organizations, developing open API standards, and otherwise glued to software development)–but having an API to anything — your software or your Internet software — is the simplest thing in the world. If you have software, you have an API.

An API is just that — an interface to whatever your software does, good or bad. If you can’t turn out a decent API for ANY Internet service or software application– even a simple REST or SOAP service–I don’t know what kind of software developers you are hiring. Sure, it takes a decent software developer to create a well-thought out, easy to use API, but that’s basically what software developers are paid to do all day–create application programming interfaces to their software and algorithms.

It’s not the API that matters– it’s if:

a) Your API provides something useful to the world

b) If you can get software developers to adopt it

C) If anyone cares enough about your service to BOTHER using the API

Just having an API–as in “oh, we have an API, you should fund us”–isn’t enough.  Everything has an API — perhaps only available privately, but easily enough exportable — it’s what you do with it.

Santa Monica’s ThisNext has just put up a new real-time activity map on their web site, which shows what people are shopping/browsing for on Google Maps. Sort of interesting to watch. (as most people who read socalTECH know, we have our own map mashup of recent venture deals on our web site–though our map mashup is not quite as mesmerizing as watching an Internet user in Norway shopping for a bikini…).

(disclaimer: Clearstone is a sponsor of this blog, and happens to be an investor in ThisNext; however sponsors don’t influence who we do or do not cover in our news, or how we cover them.)

John Dvorak has an interesting post on his thoughts on Bubble 2.0; and, a new site has launched which makes it obvious why I haven’t got what it takes to do a tech news videoblog.

I’ve been fairly amused to watch an entire economy (bubble?) build in manufactured scarcity over the last few months, based on invitations to beta releases of Web 2.0 services. This week, it seems to be the currency of trade is Pownce and Ooma; a few months ago it was Joost; there seems to be a “new! exclusive!” invitation every week. I’ve even seen some people trying to trade their invitations on mailing lists.  It seems like the next step in this bubble-like cycle is to start a web marketplace for trading beta invites (Oops! Michael Arrington just bought one).

Seriously, the whole cycle around beta invites to web sites feels awfully like the manufactured scarcity that you see from the whole collectibles market, where the value of an item is not so much based on it’s true value and usefulness, but the perceived value due to a “scarcity” that has been conjured up by some good marketing. Even if a Web 2.0 company has a dumpy AJAX-social networking-video sharing-search engine-widget site which you’d never in your life use again, the idea that you can get one of the “exclusive!” invites makes it seem like it’s worth a lot more than it really is.    It feels (to me, at least) symptomatic of the human psychology behind things like the infamous Dutch tulip bubble.