BCD Travel, the world’s third-largest corporate travel agency, will be offering its clients the opportunity to receive TripIt itineraries when they book their business travel. BCD will use the TripIt API to seamlessly transmit client bookings directly into TripIt, and, best of all, to keep those itineraries up to date as travel plans change. Thousands of travelers from companies that use BCD Travel – companies like Deloitte, SAP, Siemens, Procter & Gamble, Time Warner, Pepsico, and countless others – are already using TripIt by forwarding their booking confirmations to plans@tripit.com. Now, BCD will make it easier and better than ever for its travelers to enjoy the benefits of TripIt, by integrating directly with us.

Great showcase example of the API as a leveraged distribution channel. Opening an API for the developer community is smart, but don't forget about appealing to the business community as well. BCD is a massive company and represents a whole new channel for TripIt.

Of course, Orbitz is using the enterprise version of Google’s tools, according to its press release. While that paid service offers advanced geocoding and support capabilities, it’s just as much about the licensing requirements that make this type of service work financially for both parties. Also, Orbitz is bound to have considerable traffic for the bandwidth-intensive feature, especially once the site makes it easy to find.

A company paying for using an API is a positive sign for developers and potential API providers. Powerful APIs may be popular when they’re free, but that may not be sustainable. And when something’s free, it’s tough for others to charge. In the end this is a positive sign as the API ecosystem benefits from realistic long-term business models that work for everyone.

KDYKES: As usual, great insight on the API ecosystem from Programmableweb.com - check out the full article at the link above.

Yes, Twitter will start earning some income this year.

Co-founder Biz Stone said the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a “commercial layer” over the social network. The commercial APIs would be out “later this year,” he said.

KDYKES: No surprise to many of us who've been speculating on their revenue plans - commercial API's with added functionality for people/co's willing to pay. Surprise, surprise - they'll use their massive network of distributors (API clients) to support massive revenue. See, get how the API business development model can work.

As a focus on the API, he says "Open APIs. Taking your private SOA, opening it up to partners, and attaching a business model to it is still something that mostly Web companies do, but an growing number of traditional businesses are opening up their data to partners now in a form of decentralized, self-service business development."

Even with the success of APIs like Twitter, Amazon and Facebook, it can still be a struggle to articulate the value of opening an API to execs and other business folks whose support is needed. (Maybe this is why so many APIs are launched as skunkworks projects.) But we can start by identifying the business model.  Common ones with open APIs are:

The future of marketing is about companies developing useful applications for their customers that extend web services that the customers are already using. This replaces the current model which is to use web applications to communication with customers.  The problem with current social media marketing is the noise. A company is one of thousands, sometimes millions of users and it is easy to get lost. Developing applications via API’s provide a way for companies to break out of the crowd and at the same time create value for customers.

During the recent Mashery Business of APIs conference, I heard from a lot of different companies on how, why, and to what end they were exposing APIs.  I was particularly interested in the business model piece of it.

Here is a brief summary of some of  the business models that can be associated with an API:

Here’s how it can happen in the new decentralized, self-serve business development model based on open APIs: Yahoo creates a generic open API. Company X finds and uses the API without ever approaching Yahoo, builds a product and follows the usage rules (for example Yahoo might require a “powered by Yahoo” logo that links back to their search services). After a while company X’s service might get popular enough to warrant a direct deal with Yahoo (think of open APIs as a self-qualifying biz dev funnel). But even if it doesn’t, Yahoo gets the benefit of having thousands of small projects build on their APIs. Added together, they can make for real scale.

Fabulous article and very forward thinking in 2007. Drives home the point that done properly, the API can help achieve incredible scale.

Door Knocking 2.0: Web Services and APIs

How can a small start up that has no capacity to knock on doors sell to big companies? A possible answer can be via a web service or an API. The model is applicable to a whole range of services - from data plays like del.icio.us to messaging systems like Twitter to infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and semantic web services like Open Calais from Reuters. The basic model is to have a web service which is accessible via API (application programming interface). Clients sign up to use the service and have to agree to the terms in order to obtain a key. Using those keys, clients can use the service programmatically to send and get data from it.

Some examples: the del.icio.us API, allows clients to access information about specific users (if the user permits that). The Twitter API allows sending and receiving messages without using the Twitter web site. The Calais API is an example of a web service which encapsulates an algorithm. In this particular case, the algorithm takes a document and extracts semantic information from it. Unlike del.icio.us, which offers an interface to consumer data, Calais is a one shot deal algorithm. And perhaps the most important example of a web service play comes from Amazon. Taken collectively, the offered Amazon services is powerful infrastructure for building web-scale applications.

What is common between all these web services is the simple monetization strategy - pay per API call. For each call into the web service, the callee has to pay based on the amount of the resources consumed by the call. For example, Amazon has been charging for bandwidth, storage, and CPU time. The exact model does not matter as long as a fraction of a cent is charged for each call. Remarkably, this is a business that has a huge potential to scale. Each individual client is paying an affordable price, because each call into the web service is very cheap. However, collectively clients might amount to big revenue for the service provider.

What is the most attractive about this business model is that it is completely forecastable. By estimating the cost of scaling the business (mostly hardware, support and maintenance) and setting the price per web service call and the number of clients, you can determine if the business will work or not. Of course to be fair, we need to mention that just like in traditional sales, there is number of clients hidden in every equation. Two fundamental risks exist in this model - clients will not want to use the service and clients might not be able to figure out how to use it.

Still, the risks and costs of a web services based business are much less than the traditional enterprise approach. There is no need for an expensive sales force and an army of consultants to implement the solution. We are yet to see this model succeed in a major way, but because of their simplicity and straight revenue model the API based businesses are looking attractive.

KDYKES: Great insights from @dhinchcliffe - check out the full article.