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Nike, Adidas and Under Armour have digitally opened up their fitness and athletics products. McCormick Foods and Campbells Soup have released flavor profile data. Walgreens digitized their photo printing and prescription filling order services. Philips released programmable lightbulbs. Edmunds transformed from a car classifieds site to a digital sales inventory and vehicle information service. Most recently banks like Capital One and BBVA are encouraging developers to build new products based off banking data. All of these companies are growing because they saw new opportunities in helping third party innovators extend their products by creating new software. To succeed today, businesses are transforming into platforms on which others can build new software. Competitive, forward-thinking businesses of all kinds — startups, medium-sized companies and enterprise — are all beginning to release their data and services in a programmable form in order to encourage new business partnerships. Developers are at the center of those partnerships, as they will be the ones who enable a business to extend its reach, create new products using the company’s assets and services, and open up new revenue-sharing opportunities. John Musser, VP of Tech at Basho (one of the world’s largest application database providers), serial entrepreneur and founder of ProgrammableWeb, says one of the most misunderstood terms in business today is ‘developer’. “There is such a gross generalization as to what a developer actually means,” he says. Musser stresses that for any effective business model, knowing your customer segments is vital. “Without thinking about which type of developer, where they go for information, what they do, the companies they work with, the languages they use, their skill-sets, their pain points… many a business model has floundered or failed because of inadequate developer segmentation. You are not going to go after any market without first defining some type of segmentation.” Developers are a key business customer and partner segment, as they are the external business partners who can speed up an enterprise’s digital offerings — for example, by creating mobile and wearable apps — as well as help connect an enterprise to fast rising stars like the current generation of tech platforms including Uber and Slack, and support business units to operate more efficiently by connecting processes and data internally. Musser says when a company is thinking about how to reach different developer audiences and engage with them as business partners and growth generators, it is also worth recognizing that internal developers working behind the firewall are a segment that can be approached and engaged. These developers have their own motivations and can play a major part in encouraging consistent tech design internally. They are also responsible for building automated operational processes that create time and cost efficiencies. Preparing developer personas is a methodology that aims to document the characteristics of key developer segments that are expected to be using a business’ APIs, data, or microservices to build applications or to integrate tech solutions. VisionMobile regularly conducts global surveys — now having reached over 20,000 developers — to build and validate the world’s most comprehensive developer segmentation model across mobile, cloud, desktop and IoT platforms. This data is used to produce detailed reports, such as the recent Cloud Developer Segmentation, that focus on segments working within a specific sphere, and These State of the Developer Nation Reports are global deep-dive resources that can be used by business to segment and understand developer motivations and characteristics. A business can then craft more customized segments for each category based on their own use cases that match their specific business’ growth plans. “Segmentation used to be about which technology the developer uses, or what platform they were targeting, but now we’re more concerned with what they are trying to achieve – what does the developer get out of it?” as VisionMobile’s senior analyst Bill Ray puts it. VisionMobile’s developer segmentation model helps businesses divide their developer customers/partners into groupings not based on their skill-set — such as which platform they develop on — but on their motivations and goals as a way to organize developers into key audience groupings. This can help frame how those developers are incentivized and what resources they are provided with. While there is a return on investment for development engagement activities, a business can only pursue so many market segments at any given time. Developer segmentation helps a business identify how to prioritize developer engagement resources to create a constant wave of S-curves. Depending on the business/tech cycle stage, this may first involve supporting developer Explorers and Scouts who are looking at the horizon and will be creating the next generation of products a business can market. Then, new revenue opportunities are created by harnessing Guns for Hire and Hunter devs who are building third party apps. A third wave of dev engagement then focuses on Enterprise IT and Product extenders who will use software to improve efficiency or engage customers more effectively. Kristen Womack is a consultant who works on digital strategies, and has helped several businesses document their developer personas. She gave a talk about approaches to documenting developer personas at the API Strategy and Practice conference last year. “I gravitate more to understanding the sentiment and the feeling the developer is having,” says Womack. “For example, for a lot of developers what really wows them is when something works smoothly and is a little bit clever. I try to focus on the feeling because the skills are irrelevant as more developers move between platforms,” she says. By focusing on the motivations that drive a developer, Womack says, a business has a much higher success rate of engaging effectively. Jérôme Louvel, CEO of Restlet, one of the world’s largest open source IDE platforms, says creating developer personas is a user research activity that must be carried out “like for any other agile IT project”. He suggests creating developer personas and then generating user stories around how they engage with the various resources the business provides to help them achieve their goals. Understanding their motivations is crucial for documenting user stories. But beyond that initial interaction, Louvel says that developer personas can be used to keep a developer community engaged with the business. “We see an increasing awareness of the importance of the overall developer experience, which encompasses not only initial application development, but also the operations and engagement activities on an IT project, as a whole,” says Louvel. “The key here is to personify, categorize and prioritize correctly the developers that will use your APIs, your app backend, your microservice or your integration process so that it becomes more natural to think about the experience that those developers — depending on their goals and skills — will have at various level of interaction with your solution.” Womack says that for developer personas to drive revenue and build out a successful ecosystem, the personas must be used as regularly referenced business tools. “I see most people create them and they just sit there,” Womack warns. “What I recommend is an ‘information radiators’ approach: if you put up the information you want people to absorb, there is more likelihood they will be referred to and used regularly.” Womack says she has seen developer personas posted on lab walls, given a specific spot in standup meetings, and even had slackbots created so that a dev persona can chime in on a feature channel discussion, for example. “It is a bit like that quote about Jeff Bezos always having a chair set aside in meetings to represent the customer, it is about making room and space for the developer persona.” Womack also recommends assigning a team member to maintain the persona, to perhaps ask at standup meetings on a regular basis, “Is there anything we learnt about Amy, one of our developer personas, yesterday?” Louvel is heartened by how the current interest in developer personas he is seeing in the enterprise: “I see a growing trend that puts the developer persona at the center of the API creation process, especially for private APIs,” Louvel says. “The developer who will consume a business’ API needs to have tighter and tighter control over the defined API. If the developer is involved too late in the creation process, then they won’t be able to build the proper solution such as a mobile or web app UI.” Increasingly, all businesses — whether they be Nike, McCormick Foods, Walgreens, Philips, or Capital One — across all sectors are becoming tech businesses. As part of this shift, businesses are opening up their data and services as components that can be integrated into applications and processes by third party partners. In this economy, developers become crucial to enabling revenue growth and can help extend market reach by helping a business create new digital products, or integrate into other digital platforms. Business models and business plans must better target developer segments in order to leverage new growth. Developer personas are a key tool to successfully build these new partner relationships. The Cloud Developer Segmentation Report by VisionMobile, is based on the 10th edition of the Developer Economics survey that reached over 21,000 respondents from 150 countries and provides detailed data on thousands of cloud developers. The  report looks in detail at the cloud developer segments, seeing how motivations map to tools and business models, providing an insight into what applications they are creating and how they are creating them. Consequently it divides developers into eight segments, based on what they want to achieve rather than the tools they use to achieve it. #appdevelopers #cloudsegmentation #developer #personas

[UPDATE: The survey is now closed -Enjoy the infographic] Have you ever asked yourselves what would the world be like if there were only 100 developers in it? Well even if you haven’t, we are sure we have just made you think about it. Based on our Developer Economics survey that reaches 30,000+ devs per year, across mobile, IoT, cloud, desktop, AR/VR, machine learning , we designed a very interesting Infographic illustrating this scenario. Check it out and find interesting insights about the Developer World : How many men and women would this world include ? Which continent would be the most populated ? How many would be Pros and how many Hobbyists ? How experienced are developers  in this world? What is the most popular coding language? Embed #appdevelopers #pros #hobbyists #software #developerpopulation

These days everyone and their uncle is talking about chatbots as the next thing after apps. But ‘Chatbot’ is a rather poor name for explaining the changes taking hold in mobile. ‘Chatbots’ are a mental model suited to developers. The term means very little to users. Besides, ‘chatbots’ represent only a small part of what is happening in the messaging space. The tech media and blogosphere usually focus on one of three things when talking about ‘chatbots’: the merits of the conversational UI the promise and reality of AI-based natural language processing, and messaging platforms as an alternative to app store distribution. In reality these three things are quite independent and sometimes the discussion in the media reminds me of the famous Indian proverb about an elephant and the blind men. The elephant is really about billions of people relying on messaging as their main person-to-person communication tool and in the process getting used to what Dan Grover, WeChat Product Manager, calls the thread-centric UI. It’s no stretch to see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric). The next natural step is to apply the same thread-centric paradigm to communicating with businesses on mobile. It works brilliantly. It works in China, where WeChat/Weixin is on the way to becoming an alternative to the mobile Internet itself. It works in Brazil, where WhatsApp has become a one-stop solution for everyone, from small businesses to government agencies, to manage everything, from transactions to recipes and relationships. The messaging quadrant There are thousands of business to consumer chat services already, from early-stage startups like ChatandBook and AndChill, to large corporations like KLM, Disney and NBCUnversal. To compare and contrast all the different approaches we consider two independent axes: Apps vs. no apps, and AI vs no AI. The “apps vs no apps” axis is about whether the service is delivered as a standalone iOS or Android app, or whether the service ‘lives” inside horizontal messaging platforms (Messenger, Slack, Skype, Telegram, Kik, as well as SMS). The “AI vs no AI” axis is about whether the chat service is powered entirely by human operators or uses AI-based natural language processing to automate all or parts of conversations. These 2 axes give us what we call “the messaging quadrant”. Apps without AI: There are iOS or Android apps that connect users with human operators through a chat-based interface. For example, HotelTonight offers a human concierge service called Aces inside its mobile app. Snapdeal, Indian e-commerce service, provides chat-based support to its users by connecting them with human operators, again within the Snapdeal app. Yup (formerly MathCrunch) connects students with tutors over a chat-based app. Wellness specialist Vida connects users of its app with human coaches. Pana connects you with a real travel agent, and on and on. Apps with AI: In this quadrant we find standalone chat apps that use AI to automate all or parts of the interaction with users. For example, GoButler uses AI to help you with travel planning. Ozlo helps you to pick a restaurant or a coffee shop, Lola Travel reinvents personal travel by combining of AI with human travel agents, and so on. The mobile app approach makes most sense for companies that already have a significant user base (like Snapdeal or HotelTonight). They don’t have to rely on the broken app store distribution to attract users. For everyone else, I believe a native iOS or Android app is just a stop gap. The high cost of making, distributing and supporting native apps combined with the distribution power of messaging platforms will push the majority of companies to skip mobile apps completely and deliver their services directly inside messaging platforms. Let’s look at some examples. Operator, a US-based shopping assistant that connects users with shopping experts initially started as an iOS mobile app, but recently started offering its services over Facebook Messenger. No apps, no AI: In this quadrant we find services connecting users with human operators inside popular messaging apps or SMS. For example, Rogers, a Canadian telecom operator offer access to its support operators through Facebook Messenger. Examples are numerous. If this sounds boring, consider the business potential of replacing millions of 1-800 customer support numbers with 21st century technology and user experience. Just replacing clunky IVR with simple messaging plus custom buttons and asynchronous communication with the agents are huge steps forward. (I hope you’re not listening to some boring hold music over the telephone while reading this post.) There is also a growing number of services connecting users with human operators and providers over messaging platforms. For example, HealthTap makes its network of U.S. physicians available to Messenger users worldwide. AI without apps: This area generates most excitement with entrepreneurs. It allows access to users without the costs and headaches of native mobile apps, while promising to be much more scalable than services dependent on human operators. AI can have enormous impact without reaching full automation. Consider that in customer support recognising and automatically responding to the top 10 simple queries, while routing everything else to a human operator might allow a big corporation to cut lots of call centre jobs. Facebook itself is experimenting with M on Messenger, where it uses humans to train AI and create a fully automated personal assistant. Assist uses natural language processing to connect users with a host of on-demand services over SMS, Messenger, Slack, Telegram and Kik. Meekan automates meeting scheduling for Slack teams and on the way helps you to find the flight. Databot allows you to “speak with your database” simply in a Slack chat. The list of automated chat services grows every hour. One critically important question remains unanswered: How users will discover thousands and potentially millions of 3rd party services available inside messaging platforms? Slack Bot Directory, for example, adopts an approach similar to mobile app stores. Users can browse selection of Slack bots organized by categories or popularity. Facebook and Microsoft seem ready to take a different approach: Facebook M virtual assistant will be able to recommend chat services based on the current conversation and requests. Microsoft demonstrated how the company’s Cortana virtual assistant automatically summons and dismisses 3rd party chat services in a conversation. A post-app ecosystem in the making Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product, Facebook Messenger said at TechCrunch Disrupt that “tens of thousands” of developers are making messaging bots for the Facebook Messenger platform. Already tens of companies are building tools for bot developers – From giants like Facebook and Microsoft, to startups like Smooch, Kasisto, Reply, Meya, and Init. It’s clearly the beginning of a post-app wave and the hottest opportunity for developers disillusioned by mobile apps. We cannot wait to share the results of our 12th Developer Economics survey, which includes questions on bot development. #aichatbots #artificialinteligence #chatbots #chatbox

Did you know that 91% of IoT developers use open source technology in their projects? Our latest Premium report in the IoT series –Open source in the Internet of Things -not only confirms the figure but also sheds light to a number of tools and strategies that developers employ for open source, open hardware and open data. The Open Source in IoT report provides developer program managers with objective data-backed insights on the use of open source technology by IoT developers and helps them to manage the use of open source in their projects. Some of the key questions that this report answers include: How mainstream is open source in the Internet of Things? Is it just for hobbyists and idealists, or is there more to it than that? Which developer demographics use open source and why? How can I make sense of the hundreds of open source, open hardware, and open data licenses that are out there? Should your project be open or closed? How can you use open source to achieve commercial success? The data in this report comes from our 10th edition Developer Economics survey (Q4 2015). 3,700 Internet of Things developers answered questions about their use of and attitude towards open source technology. To give you an idea of the findings of the IoT report we have prepared an infographic depicting some of the key findings. Have a look at some of the most interesting trends that have been extracted from the report and give a very  representative outline of the the mindset of IoT developers and their contribution to the open source community  : #opensourcecode #iot #internetofthings #opensource #softwareopensource #IoTdeveloper

Open Source in the Internet of Things is our new report and part of IoT report series. 3,700 Internet of Things developers answered questions regarding this issue in our 10th edition Developer Economics survey : How mainstream is open source in the Internet of Things? Is it just for hobbyists and idealists, or is there more to it than that? Which developer demographics use it and why? How can I make sense of the hundreds of open source, open hardware, and open data licenses that are out there? Should your project be open or closed? How can you use open source to achieve commercial success? The report provides developer program managers with objective data-backed insights on the use of open source technology by IoT developers and helps them to manage its use in their projects. Find out more about the key questions that this report answers.

We recently published a report showing that e-commerce doubled in popularity as a business model for Internet of Things (see Commerce of Things report for details). But what does an ecommerce business model really mean in the case of Internet of Things? Broadly speaking, a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. We add to that the question of how an organization creates a sustainable competitive advantage (a barrier to entry that is difficult to replicate by competitors). It’s simpler than it sounds. Let’s take Oral-B, a toothbrush maker, as an example. (This example works well in our strategy workshops.) A toothbrush maker creates value by improving dental health. The value is delivered through, well, a toothbrush. The value is captured by sales of toothbrushes through retail channels. Ability to put the product in front of as many shopper as possible is of paramount importance. Therefore, access to the retail shelf-space becomes the key competitive advantage. Can we use technology to make a better toothbrush? Of course! Let’s make a Bluetooth-connected toothbrush that comes together with a smartphone app. Now the “smart” toothbrush helps Oral-B do a better job in maintaining dental health by “focusing, tracking, motivating and sensing” (whatever that may mean). The toothbrush is smarter, but the business model isn’t. The connected product supposedly creates more value for consumers, but all the other elements of the business model remain the same. The value is still delivered through a toothbrush device, captured by the sales through retail channels, and access to the retail shelf-space is still the key competitive advantage. Not much business model innovation here. What’s next?… Well, let’s make an open toothbrush! Developers will use a Software Development Kit (SDK) of the open toothbrush to make apps that extend the product. Sceptics, of course, will ask “who the heck needs developers to extend the toothbrush?” But mothers of young kids will see a sea of opportunity here: Someone can make a game rewarding kids for good job in teeth brushing and save the mom the need to “hover over their kids telling them that a couple of brushes is not good enough” (actual quote from a Slack conversation). Now we are making progress with innovating on the business model, too. Not only do developers improve in value creation, but value is delivered through apps working in concert with the connected toothbrush. Plus, the developer ecosystem formed around our developer program creates competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate. However, we still have to make money by one-time sales of the “smart” toothbrush through retail channels. (See “5 Ways Developers Can Extend Your Business Model” for deeper discussion on the role developers in business model innovation.) Can we take the business model even further? Meet Beam Dental. The Ohio-based company offers a connected toothbrush that comes together with dental insurance and a subscription for the supply of floss, toothpaste, and brush heads—all delivered to your doorstep every 3 months. In fact, the offering is a recurring service that makes money outside the “toothbrush market” going beyond one-time product sales. The toothbrush itself is part of the customer acquisition costs for the much more lucrative dental insurance and dental consumables market. Beam completely reimagines the business model of a “connected toothbrush”. The value creation is much more comprehensive and includes all aspects of the dental health. Value is delivered through insurance and re-supply service. Value is captured through making money in insurance and consumables businesses. The toothbrush and the app are “top of the funnel” consumer touch points allowing Beam to acquire new users and interact with their customers. Notably, Beam doesn’t really compete with toothbrush makers like Oral-B. Instead, the company competes in the dental insurance market, where it has decisive competitive advantage in the form of consumer data collected by the toothbrush and the app. This data helps the company to optimise its insurance premiums and offer insurance at prices that are difficult to match for the traditional insurance companies. As simple as they may sound, the series of toothbrush examples shows that: Technology (software, connectivity or data), when viewed as a feature of a product, is hardly a game changer for the product maker. Opening the product to the external innovation by developers can create competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate. E-commerce companies see devices not as source of profits, but as a part of the customer acquisition costs, serving as a vehicle for customer acquisition and engagement. (Amazon Echo or Xiaomi phones are not much different in this respect.) You can replace the toothbrush with almost any everyday object to see how adding connectivity, developers and data can help reimagine its business model. (See this video on understanding developers.) — Michael #customeracquisition #ecommerce #iotdeveloperprograms #toothbrush

Integrated Development Environments have evolved to solve every problem a developer can have, but in recent years we’ve seen a scaling back of capabilities as developers embrace more-basic options. At VisionMobile our latest developer survey is (amongst other things) trying to find out why, though we do have some ideas on the subject. When I first programmed a computer I was lambasted, and very nearly ejected from the school computer club, for not having written my program out on paper before arrival. Computer time was too precious to spend composing lines of code, minutes at the keyboard should be spent entering pre-written programs; not making them up as one went along. Needless to say that was a very long time ago, and these days program composition is done using a screen (or several) with working code being thrown together in what looks suspiciously like a process of trial-and-error. The modern IDE won’t let a compiler crash for want of a missing semicolon, or the use of the Queen’s English (“colour”? Really? ). A modern IDE will spot variables using the wrong case, and APIs which haven’t been imported, reducing the development time and making life easier for the developer – but, if modern IDEs are so great, why do so many developers choose not to use them? Vi, Emacs, Notepad++, and Sublime, all make regular appearances in developer toolkits, despite the existence of fully-featured alternatives. You might be a savant mnemonic who’s only outlets are Street Fighter II and programming in Vi, but for most humans a menu structure and “compile” button are essentials. Microsoft’s Visual Studio is still the standard by which others are measured, though at $499 it’s not the cheapest option which may put some people off. Eclipse provides almost as much utility for a lot less money (none at all), and Visual Studio Code (Microsoft’s free code editor) is now at version 1, and also free. A licence for Sublime Text, on the other hand, will cost you $70 – so the choice is not really about money. We know that [tweetable]developers increasingly work across platforms, languages, and sectors[/tweetable], and this may provide an answer. Visual Studio can do it all, creating applications for mobile devices, embedded technology, and cloudy servers, but so can Notepad++, and with less effort, and better support. Take the support site for the Adafruit Trinket (a $7 prototyping board), which provides a step-by-step guide to creating applications using the Arduino IDE, so when I want to program a Trinket then that’s what I use. I’m sure that I could use Visual Studio, and it would be pretty and probably reduce my development time, but it would take effort to get it configured and I don’t spend enough time programming the Trinket to make it worthwhile. Similarly – if I’m knocking out some Python I’ll boot up IDLE, and when I need a bit of HTML I’ll use Notepad++. These are not the best tools available, but they are the default tools and will work with every library, plugin, and extension available. If I programmed Python every day then I’d find a better tool (or perhaps a better job), but I’m too lazy to muck about getting a proper IDE configured and will make do with what’s available. Thanks to a dot.com development career I’ve no time for debuggers or unit testing (testing is what users are for) which makes these bare-bones tools ideal for me, but what we at VisionMobile would like to know is why you choose one IDE over another, and how many you’re using on a daily basis. When you complete our 11th Developer Economics survey you won’t just be asked which IDE you like to use, but also what you use it for, and why you like to use it. We’ll break down the data, and share information on who is using what, and why. We’re not just collecting data on how developers create software, we’re collecting data on how developers would like to create software, and what stands in their way, so if you have 12 minutes to spare then do join us in finding out. #developersurvey #ide #integrateddeveloperenvironment #onlinesurvey

Or why the new API evangelists might not even need to code Some years ago APIs were clearly built and branded for developers. The marketing playbook of an API first company was straightforward: sponsor developer events and send developer evangelists around the world to attend hackathons and conferences. But the market is maturing and what was considered as products for developers only now appeals to many more profiles. [tweetable]APIs are starting to fill the toolboxes of many marketing, sales and support teams[/tweetable]. The line between pure API and pure SaaS product is blurring and this trend will accelerate and give birth to great companies. First lets see what are the consequences at the product and distribution levels. Product: more touchpoints with more users The most obvious evolution in term of product is how users can interact with APIs: before it was mainly through a terminal or an IDE (a.k.a a code editor, where developers write code) and now it’s also through platform plugins, widgets, messaging bots and drag and drop interfaces, which are democratizing the way we use APIs. Let me take some examples to illustrate it. Clearbit Clearbit is probably the best example of this new generation of API startups which are built to ride this trend. It offers a classic API for developers but also many platform plugins and widgets ready to use “out of the box” for SalesForce, Slack, Google Spreadsheet, Gmail, Marketo, close.io etc… without touching a line of code. In the same category Email Hunter is also an interesting example of an API first startup with a great Google Chrome extension. Timekit Timekit is an availability & scheduling API which lets you build real-time booking solutions without reinventing the wheel. Again, they offer a classic API for developers but also a ustomizable widget that anybody can use to integrate a booking calendar on their website. Algolia Algolia is well known for its kickass developer API (we’re proud investors) but they also recently launched DocSearch, which lets you add search to your documentation without having to dig in their API at all (you share the url of your documentation, they crawl the pages and create your search index automatically). Tray.io Tray.io is an integration platform for connecting the tools you use every day. It’s a good example of a well designed drag and drop interface that you use to connect tools together. I believe that we’ll see more and more of these interfaces to configure API products. I can totally imagine such an interface for Algolia where you drag’n drop the different elements of a page you want to index on a side bar that you order (to setup fields priority), then the pages are automatically crawled and your search widget is created. Distribution: non developers are the new API evangelists We’ve just seen how the products are impacted but the changes are obviously going beyond product. This democratization also impacts how these startups market their API and acquire customers. I’ve personally witnessed several startups adopting Clearbit after it was initially brought by the sales or marketing team and not by the dev team. API marketing / acquisition will not only be about sponsoring hackathons and sending developer evangelists to conferences but also about providing value to non developers and leverage them as internal evangelists. It’s kind of funny to think that marketers and sales can bring APIs in their companies without the approval of developers first (what the developers actually do with the IT department :-)). But make no mistake, these [tweetable]startups need to provide an awesome API to convince developers to really close the loop[/tweetable]. Developers are of course still at the heart of these products. Is it a real trend or fad? I believe this is a real trend. I think we’ll see an increasing number of this new breed of API startups for which the line between pure API and SaaS is blurring. This trend is driven by several factors. The traditional SaaS product model has limitations In many software categories (Marketing, Sales, Support etc…) there is no shortage of SaaS. And plenty are really good. But at the same time I’m still hearing many people complaining that SaaS X or Y is cool but does not fulfill all their needs and that they are looking for a better solution blablabla. The truth is that traditional SaaS products cannot answer 100% of the needs of every company. This is a compromise inherent to a product model where the features are packaged and organized the same way for every customer (very little product customization). If a SaaS can cover 80% of your needs it’s already huge. The 20% of “frustration” left are due to the fact that every company is different so you need a bit of customization. And this new breed of APIs are perfect to to cover these 20%. This is exactly what happens with Clearbit. Most of the startups that I know and which are using it didn’t replace all their sales and contact management tools with Clearbit. They just leverage the flexibility of its API and widgets to solve the 20% of uncovered needs or to enhance the products they already use. And this approach would be interesting for many more categories. I cannot wait to see the Clearbit of customer support (please drop me an email if you see that clement@pointninecap.com). We’re reaching a critical mass of B2B platforms SalesForce, Google Gmail — Spreadsheets — Docs and Analytics, Slack, Marketo… the number of mature B2B platforms is only increasing and this is great for the democratization of APIs at several levels: As a delegated UI. APIs can reach non developer users where they already are and on interfaces with which they are already familiar. As a distribution channel. Promoting and marketing API widgets on these platforms will be key to reach more customers. What’s next? My 2 cents: We’ll see more of this new breed of APIs emerge. We’ll see more pure developer APIs expand their targets to non developers. Several software categories are craving for this approach (like Support, Analytics, Marketing). As usual don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments or to send me an email at clement@pointninecap.com, especially if you are an API startup 🙂 The post was originally posted on Medium.com –Clement Vouilon Clement Vouillon senior research analyst at point Nine Capital

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of Messenger vs Skype vs Slack vs Telegram? Conversational UI and messaging bots are becoming one of the defining tech trends of 2016. The idea of mobile messaging as a B2B2C channel has been proved in China by hugely popular Tencent’s Weixin/WeChat messaging platform. Messaging dominates time people spend with their phones. Why not use messaging to connect users and businesses? This approach is being imported to The West by Facebook, Telegram, Kik, and now Microsoft, all competing for the leadership of the post-app era. The lessons learned from the iOS and Android platform wars can help us see future winners in the brewing battle of messaging platforms. [tweetable]The mobile platform war was won by the halo effect between users and 3rd party developers[/tweetable]. Users attract developers. Developer create apps. Apps attract more users, which attract more developers. A very similar dynamic is taking hold in messaging platforms now. Back in 2011, when mobile app platforms were very new, we created a 5-ingredient framework to help our clients understand why iOS and Android are becoming so powerful so fast and why they soon to become a duopoly. The framework stood the test of time helping us predict the duopoly of iOS and Android, the fate of HTML5, and the demise of Nokia and Windows Phone. I find the tried and tested 5-ingredient framework very useful for making sense of the emerging landscape of messaging platforms. Successful computing platforms like iOS or Android have 5 key ingredients: Software foundations: a rich set of APIs with managed fragmentation and a toolset for creating apps and services A community of developers writing to the same set of APIs to spur innovation and cater to diverse use cases Distribution (reach) to millions of user across multiple devices A means of monetization, such as payments or ads A means of retailing content (discovery, promotion, recommendations) Platform owners (e.g. Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) control their ecosystems of users and developers by means of two control points. First, [tweetable]platform owners control content creation by locking developers into a proprietary API[/tweetable]. Second, platform owners control content distribution by gating how apps are discovered by and distributed to end users. The same exact thinking applies to messaging platforms: The winners and losers in messaging wars will be defined by the strength of the halo effect between users and bot developers, and The owners of the messaging platforms will battle for rights over bot creation and bot distribution control points. The 5-ingredient framework helps to see the relative strengths and weaknesses of Messenger, Skype, Kik, Telegram and Slack platforms, as well as where these companies may put their efforts next. For simplicity, I’ll keep LINE and Amazon Alexa outside the picture for the time being. So far the focus of Western messaging platforms was clearly on bootstrapping their developer ecosystems. This begins with publishing an open API, but the key to success is in creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around this API. Slack and Telegram are in the lead today. Facebook and Microsoft will intensify their developer outreach efforts following their API announcements. At VisionMobile we are measuring how Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, Telegram, Kik and others are successful in attracting developer attention in the upcoming 11th edition of our Developer Experience Tracker survey. As the messaging ecosystem matures, the focus will shift to distribution, monetisation, and retailing of business accounts and bots. WeChat is already at this phase with their almost 700M monthly active users, the popular Tenpay payment network and widespread use of QR codes in China. WeChat QR codes are used to discover and register for updates from WeChat official accounts. Facebook Messenger looks the strongest contender for the leader of Western messaging platforms, with 800M monthly active users, integration with Facebook Payments, and the expected announcement of a “bot store” at the F8 2016 conference on April 12. Microsoft made an impressive set of announcements about opening Skype to developers, the Bot Framework, and integration with Cortana’s AI capabilities, during their Build conference in March 2016. At the same time, Skype will need a credible payment solution to compete with Messenger in the consumer market in the long run. Telegram was an early leader of the Western messaging bot space introducing its Bot Platform in June 2015. The platform gained substantial traction with developers who created thousands messaging bots for the platform since then. Many of these bots are mere experiments and the lack of an official “bot store” reminds me of the early days of Palm OS developer ecosystem. It’s difficult to see how Telegram can escape its niche status given Facebook and Microsoft are opening their messaging platforms for developers. It’s still very early days of the post-app era. Many questions remain. Will Apple, Snapchat, Viber or even Google join the game? Which messaging platforms will gain the most developer traction? Will discovery and recommendations of bots be done through a “bot store” or some other mechanism? What new use cases will stick across ecommerce, customer support and entertainment? We will continue following this exciting space in our developer surveys and in our analysis of the messaging platform landscape. Stay tuned for the results of our first-ever bot developer survey coming with our upcoming Developer Experience Tracker. — Michael

VisionMobile’s CEO, Andreas Constantinou will be speaking at the Webit.Festival in Sofia on April 20. He’ll be discussing “The Era of Developers as Business Model Extenders” Digital incumbents from Amazon to Xiaomi are redefining globalisation using ecosystems, business models, and products that break industry boundaries. Andreas Constantinou will explain how these incumbents rely on developers to extend products and business models across industries, from communications to insurance.

That might sound odd, but it’s one of many conclusions draw from our biannual study, and presented in our (free) State of the Developer Nation report. The report draws on data from our most recent survey of those working in software, which reached nearly 22,000 respondents, and found that [tweetable]software developers have less experience than they did a year ago[/tweetable]. Not individually of course; there’s no memory loss involved here, but the developer community is growing, and new programmers inevitably bring down the average level of experience, and that has serious implications for the future of the industry. If we take mobile developers, who are typical, we can see that right now 40% of them have been developing software for more than six years, but a year ago that proportion was 43%. Conversely, at the other end of the spectrum we have 17% of developers with less than a year under their belt, up from 14% this time last year. That pattern is repeated across all sectors, even IoT (which is so nascent it often bucks the trends). While a good proportion of software developers have built up their skills over time we are going to have to adjust to a world where more software is being created by developers with less hands-on experience, and understand the implications of that trend. One of those implication is a shift in the popularity of certain programming languages over their more-traditional brethren. This time we’re focusing in on the last six months, but if we again look at mobile developers we can see them embracing scripting languages, at the cost of Java and the various forms of C. Objective C takes the biggest hit, assaulted by Apple’s new wonderkid Swift on one side, and the (JavaScript powered) cross-platform toolkits on the other. [tweetable]Objective C is dropping fast, while C/C++ has a gentle decline[/tweetable] and C# is just about holding its mindshare (thanks to Xamarin, which compiles C# to Android and is now a Microsoft property). On the cloud the trend is less pronounced, but still evident. Java is growing, but so are all the other languages. PHP… C#… Python… in fact all the top languages have gained mindshare as cloud developers become increasingly polyglot while giving up on some of the niche dialects. One area on the rise, across all the sectors, is the use of visual tools for software development. These drag-‘n-drop environments are often looked down upon by “proper” programmers, who respect the digital hierarchy (where Assembler is king, dialects of C make up the court, Java is left outside the room, and scripting languages aren’t permitted into the palace). These visual tools are still only used by a minority (25% of mobile developers, 19% of cloud) and fewer still rely on them as a primary tool (5% across mobile and cloud) but that proportion is growing steadily, and relentlessly. The fact is that there aren’t enough low-level programmers to go around, and most applications don’t need them. Visual tools, and scripting languages, are good enough for the vast majority of applications in any sector. That applies across consumer and enterprise markets, as users of all kinds start creating apps with a few clicks, but there is a question about how long can we consider those users to be software developers, and the tools they use to be designed for software development. “If This Then That” (IFTTT.com) is a marvellous tool, enabling anyone to create “recipes” where an event (“this”) triggers an action (“that”). So an incoming email can trigger the (Philips Hue) lights to flash red three times, making the owner feel like Batman while simultaneously aggravating his whole family. IFTTT users can chain recipes together, creating actions that seed multiple events, loop back on themselves, and even branch based on inputs, so at some point we have to accept that the IFTTT user has become a software developer, or that IFTTT shows us what the future of software development might look like. Not all applications will be written that way of course, lower-level languages will still be needed to plumb the functionality together, but there will come a time when the vast majority of applications will be created by developers with no software development experience at all. That day is a long way off, but with every year it gets a little closer and our data shows that process in action. You can see more by downloading our State of the Developer Nation report, or talking to us about drilling down into the survey data. #developereconomics #developerskills

How are desktop and cloud development evolving? We’ve prepared an infographic with some key insights that can help you better understand the cloud and desktop developer landscape, based on our recent report focusing on the topic. Here are some of the key insights: [tweetable]49% of developers are working professionally across both cloud and desktop[/tweetable] [tweetable]41% of desktop developers are creating applications which never leave the browser[/tweetable] [tweetable]54% of cloud developers who use advertising are making less than $500/month[/tweetable] Check out the infographic for more insights! Want more insights? Find out how you can access the full report.

We recently published our new report “Cloud and Desktop Developer Landscape”. We extracted data from our 9th edition Developer Economics survey, which reached over 13,500 respondents from 149+ countries, tracking developer experiences across platforms, revenues, apps, languages, tools, APIs, segments and regions. Find out more about what applications cloud and desktop developers are creating and how they are creating them.

Back in the 1990’s, during the first great browser war, we were assured that our web browser would soon be the only platform we would need. Applications would dynamically download and the single-click hyperlink would simplify interfacing to the point where computing was accessible to the masses. Sadly, and despite waterfalls of VC cash splashing around at the time, that didn’t happen, but twenty years later at least part of the dream is becoming true. At VisionMobile we’ve been looking at Desktop developers, taking data from our biannual Developer Economics survey which reached more than 13,000 developers across 140 countries. When we look at that data we can see that the never-humble web browser is now the most-popular platform amongst desktop developers, and those who aren’t developing for it are distributing their apps through it. Windows Classic (versions prior to Windows 8) still makes a strong showing, but with the sole exception of Eastern Europe the most-important platform for desktop developers is now the web browser. Many of the original arguments in favour of web-based applications are still valid: Inherent support for cross-platform applications, fast development using WISIWYG paradigms, and a runtime environment that can execute code which make a finite number of monkeys blush, while the many of the limitations have passed into oblivion. Back in the day Apple users were still happy with a single click and the long-hold, but the rest of us could manage to use two fingers. But that didn’t stop Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing the hyperlink-as-an-interface with Windows Active Desktop, in 1997. The new paradigm replaced the Windows desktop with a web page, complete with hyperlinks, embedded content, and security holes big enough for an Australian road train. Anyone who had used Windows before ended up running applications twice (double click is a hard habit to kick) while everyone else wondered why the icons were all underlined (hyperlinks were always underlined in the 90’s), and Microsoft shelved the idea with the launch of Windows Vista. But shelving doesn’t mean giving up, and web interfaces have come on a very long way since then. Drag ‘n drop, right clicking, accessible hardware, and application persistence, have made the browser into a workable user interface, which is why [tweetable]65% of the global desktop developer community is targeting the browser as a platform[/tweetable] in which to run their applications. Google is rebuilding the browser-as-a-platform with ChromeOS, though its recent announcements regarding the use of Android on laptops (notably the Pixel C) throws some doubt on the company’s commitment to the Netscape dream. Even developers who aren’t creating browser-apps are dependent on the browser to get their native apps distributed. Our figures show that the majority of applications are being distributed that way even if they are executed locally. Both Apple and Microsoft are trying hard to get desktop developers to embrace the app-store concept, exchanging the freedom of channel for the security of a curated store, but with limited success. Even in games; the most-popular category, only 25% are sent out through an app store compared to the 29% which are delivered through the web browser. App stores are very nice things to have. Secure distribution of applications reduces the quantity of malware enormously, and the tighter the platform is locked down the less malware there is, but app stores also assure clean uninstallations and provide a central location for peer reviews to quickly identify errant (or worthless) applications. That’s one reason why Microsoft and Apple are working so hard to promote them, but it is not the only one. Quite apart from the revenue stream (30% of every transaction sure adds up) there is the matter of control and communications – Apple controls the applications available for iOS devices, while Google exerts less (but still significant) control over Android, but those companies also maintain a relationship with the end user which disintermediates the network operator, the device manufacturer, and anyone else in between. In 2007 Vodafone’s CEO, Arun Sarin, summed up the operators’ position, which was largely built upon hubris: “The simple fact that we have the customer and billing relationship is a hugely powerful thing that nobody can take away from us … Whoever comes into the marketplace is going to have to work through us” Application stores replace that billing relationship, undermining the operators’ relationship with the customer and opening the way for more premium services (video, music, etc) to be sourced from the platform owner with the minimum of friction. Right now the browser is the preferred runtime platform, and the preferred distribution mechanism for desktop developers, just as Netscape envisioned it 20 years ago. That’s where we are today, but it would be a brave man who’d state that the age of the browser has arrived – developers might like it, and users have grown comfortable with the extended feature set it offers, but [tweetable]the web browser might not be serving the corporate interests which are (after all) paying for it all[/tweetable]. If you’d like to see more about what Cloud and Desktop Developers are doing then take a look at our Landscape report in the subject.