elastic.io - Automate your data flows in the cloud

elastic.io nominated for the EuroCloud Deutschland Award, May 14, 2013 - keep your fingers pressed

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:50:37 +0200

elastic.io nominated for the EuroCloud Deutschland Award, May 14, 2013 - keep your fingers pressed:

07.05.2013 | 13:55 Nominierte fr EuroCloud Deutschland Award stehen festPreisverleihung nach ECDC am 14. Mai in Karlsruhe …

We are excited about the nomination for the EuroCloud Deutschland Award! Keep your fingers pressed for us, please!

How elastic.io helps SaaS vendors to unleash new revenue sources

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:15:11 +0200

How elastic.io helps SaaS vendors to unleash new revenue sources:

http://www.saas-forum.net/blog/gastbeitrag-case-study-wie-elastic-io-saas-anbietern-hilft-mit-hilfe-von-integrationen-neue-umsatzquellen-zu-erschliessen/07052013#comments

What is the cloud? (2/2)

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:30:24 +0100

…today…

Hybrid cloud is the referring to the ability to scale hardware capacity in case the own server capacity is insufficient at peak times. But it takes some effort to marry the two concepts!

Since Apple set up its iCloud it has almost become a synonym for the cloud itself. Indeed a lot of people refer to storage services such as Dropbox, box.com, Centerdevice, Strato, etc. as THE cloud. Besides being a virtual hard-drive they offer some nice integration features which we heavily use for our integrations scenarios in elastic.io - check them out!

In sum, my recommendation is: Always ask what cloud your counterpart is alluding to - it helps to avoid confusion!

What is the cloud? (1/2)

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:30:11 +0100

This year´s CeBIT most overused word is “cloud” - it is time to clean up this communication mess and hand out a few clarifications here:

a) Private Cloud vs. b) Public Cloud vs. c) Hybrid Cloud vs. d) Storage Cloud!

A private cloud is nothing else than a server in the cellar, a software stack installed on it + a few applications communicating with the client computer (not even a browser necessarily). It used to be called Application Service Providing, but that has been overused too - so, people now rape the word cloud. But it will NOT give you the ability to scale your infrastructure nor will it give you savings on your fixed costs.

A public cloud is a rather odd wording for a server capacity and software delivery model where infrastructure / Software is rented on a monthly fee-basis instead of a putting down a large investment sum. It comes with no fixed asset costs, such as servers, admins, extra-software, etc. but comes all through your browser directly from the software provider. This is what we love and what will be the dominating software delivery model - we completely agree with Salesforce.com’s motto:

… to be continued

New component: Mandrill

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:30:30 +0100

Transactional e-mails done right

Mandrill is a transactional email product from the company which is doing MailChimp. Mandrill is build on extensive e-mail delivery know-how and infrastructure of MailChimp, but with transactional, one-to-one e-mails in mind. With Mandrill you can track sends, bounces, opens and clicks on every e-mail you sent, which is very important for us.

We use Mandrill in our communication process, for example every time new user registers for the account we are using Mandrill API to send a welcome e-mail.

We also like beautiful emails. We like the template editor integrated in MailChimp and since such templates can be used in Mandrill we are usually sending Mandrill emails with templates made in Mailchimp.

New component that we did automate such task - it sends an email using Mandrill API based on pre-defined (in Mandrill) templates.

Sample use-case - Mixpanel to Mandrill notification you can see in a great screencast from Rico:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoR6z_bCxoI

New component : WebHook

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:30:06 +0100

An updated generic WebHook trigger.

WebHooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks, you can think about them like an inbox where different web-sites and applications may store new ‘messages’ notifying you about something. For example Wordpress can use web-hooks to notify about new user comment, or Shopify will inform you about new order, etc.

WebHooks are pretty technical thing, there are different way to send them and usually it’s complicated to receive them. With elastic.io we would like to make it simpler and more understandable, that’s why we decided to expand the capabilities of WebHook component.

I will demonstrate it on the sample Flow where new file will be created in your Dropbox every time WebHook will be called:

As you can see WebHook need two configuration options:

Optional Handshake - this is an optional ‘password’ for your WebHook, if this value is set, then WebHooks that do not provide handshake value equal to it will not be processed.
Mandatory data sample - here you need to specify a sample of the data that will be send to this WebHook. This sample will help us to determine which data (or better saying meta-data) would you like to send and visualize data transformation components (Data Mapper) based on it. Sample data could be comma-separated list of values or a valid JSON.

When everything is set, you will see this in the following Data Mapper:

I hope you will enjoy using it. See more information in component help and sample screencast on how to use Wordpress WebHooks here.

New component: Twilio

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:30:30 +0100

Introducing new component - Twilio

Twilio is an innovative cloud telecommunication provider, one of the leaders of API-driven business from USA. Twilio provides an innovative ways to control telephone and SMS infrastructure. Last week we added new component based on Twilio API that allow you to:

Send SMS via Twilio API - simple send-sms action.
Receive SMS from Twillio API - a web-hook that will be notified every time your Twilio phone number will become an SMS message.

There are many interesting use-cases one could think about, here is one of them - store incoming SMS messages in Dropbox as CSV file:

Just enter your Twilio credentials, select the incoming phone number, authenticate with the Dropbox and elastic.io will do the rest.

Try it now at http://elastic.io

New component : RSS

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:30:26 +0100

Last week we added new component - RSS.

RSS is a simple syndication format. In Wikipedia you can find this:RSS.

RSS…is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS feeds can be found everywhere, from the Blog you are reading, from your Youtube channel, and many others, and now you can automate it with elastic.io

We are using allot of Apple products at elastic.io and I’m the long-time reader of MacRumors.com web-site. I configured a simple flow that every time a new entry will apear on MacRumors I will receive a push notification (via Pushover app). Here is how it looks like:

As you can see with build-in Data Mapper I put summary as a message body, message title is ‘Macrumors: {{title}}’ where {{title}} is a RSS feed entry title and URL is mapped to the original link to the MacRumors article.

Easy and simple. You can also try to do it on http://beta.elastic.io.

New week, new batch of features from elastic.io Team

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:58:09 +0100

New week just have started in Europe, here is the update on what happened at elastic.io over last week (or two).

Starting last week we are (surprise!) missing one component in our components palette - a Data Mapper.

Data Mapper is a component that transform data from one format to another. For example if you want to get notified every time new post on your favorite blog appears you would need to map an RSS Feed Data like Author, Description, Link, etc to Phone and Message Body that you would like to see on your mobile.

Majority of Apps (Components) can’t communicate without Data Mapper in between, but we noticed many flows were created without it, so we decided to make this component inserted automatically for you, like this:

So it’s easy and simple to connect two Apps now, however flow remains flexible to build multiple-steps flow.

In the next blog post tomorrow I will show what new Components (Apps) were added last week, but off course you can have a look on them yourself on http://beta.elastic.io :)

How to monitor your website behavior with push notifications to your mobile

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:31:00 +0100

Integration of mixpanel.com and Pushover Hey, elastic.io offers to receive push notifications on your mobile if something happens on your website, e.g. a new user has registered. You need to be a customer of mixpanel.com and Pushover (an app available on Google Play / Apple App store) as well as elastic.io. Elastic.io integrates the flow from mixpanel to Pushover via the platform. Watch the video for a how-to, register with elastic.io and let us know how you like it! Enjoy!

Notifications from your Wordpress Blog to your mobile

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:25:00 +0100

Hi,

do you know what webhooks are good for? In essence webhooks allows to invoke a behavior on a another website/application upon occurrence of an specified event, e.g. a comment being posted to your wordpress* blog or a user has paid in item in Shopify**.

In elastic.io we have got a webhook component which you can use generically for integration of many different services, e.g. Mailchimp (mass-emailing), dwolla (payments), etc. We have built a video tutorial showing how you can receive automatically notifications to your mobile (using Pushover***) from your Wordpress blog. You can target also other end points, e.g. dropbox, mongoDB, email, etc.

So other usecase examples could be:

Shopify => CSV => Dropbox
Wordpress => CSV => Dropbox
Dwolla => Pushover

Enjoy this video:

Let us know if you like the usecase and what other examples you want to see

Enjoy!

Best regards

Your elastic.io Tam

*Wordpress is a famous blogging software available for free

**Shopify is a ecommerce platform

***Pushover is a 3rd party app available at the Google Play store or the Apple apps store

Send event-based automated emails to users of your website with...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:14:00 +0100

Send event-based automated emails to users of your website

with an integration of Mixpanel.com with Mandrill.com! We at elastic.io are using this integration for our own purposes as well - and are loving it!

Give it a try and let us know how you like it! Have a great day, your elastic.io team!

Meet the elastic.io Team (#elasticio) at the #VentureLounge Event in Bonn, Feb 19!

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:44:00 +0100

Meet the elastic.io Team at the #VentureLounge Event in Bonn, Feb 19

. We will present our vision & business case how to automate the data flows in the cloud! See you there!

Introducing our new simplified interface

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:18:00 +0100

Learning is an essential part of our daily work. We learn from our customers, we learn from our work and we iterate quickly based on that.

We heard from our early users that our initial UI could be complicated to understand, so we decided to simplify it. Here is how elastic.io dashboard looks like now:

Plain and simple. You might notice a button ‘Create new Recipe’ is gone as well as we renamed tasks into ‘flows’. Consequently adding new flow will be two-step, on the page you will define components of your flow, and the on the next page you will configure each individual component.

We hope you’re going to love our new simplified UI. We would be happy to hear from you what do you think about it.

Want to try it in action? Register for our private beta on http://elastic.io.

API DAys Paris Day Two

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 22:33:37 +0100

In my previous blog post I described the day one of the API Days in Paris. API Days is a first and the only conference in the world dedicated to the topic of (Web) APIs. Second day of the conference was just as good as the first one.

Talk “Designing RESTFull web services” by David Zülke. Very well prepared talk and most importantly the only talk promoting use of XML. After all of the “JSON curly bracket soup” slides were full of XML samples. Main takeaways for me from this talk were:

HATEOAS is new REST
Evolving of JSON over time is complicated.
Versioning shouldn’t be done via URL but via content-types.

Recommended read - How I Explained REST to My Wife.

Some talks after we had a great meal. Just to give you impression how it looked like:

After the lunch - the THECALLR API - nice introduction in how bad it was by telecoms before and how good it is nowadays. Nice argumentation on ROI of telecom APIs, good set of use-cases for tracking phone calls, for example giving multiple phone number for different marketing campaigns to track ROI of each individual campaign.

Next interesting talk was about open data in government. Project opening data on http://www.data.gouv.fr/.

Open data and developer communities - data connexions tries to bring together the most of successful projects on open data. My take from the presentation - build a feedback loop from the ecosystem you are building.

Obviously open data efforts on the level of individual countries is a great movement to see, however taking into account European history it’s essential that such open data is stored and presented in a way that it interoperable between the countries.

Nice project to topic of inter-language interoperability - Eurovoc.

To summarize API Days was an absolutely great and unique event:

The first and the only European independent event in the world about (Web) APIs (first US event planned in NY was postponed after the hurricane sandy, so looking forward to it in Feb 2013).
Not too big (200 participants)
Very good selection of talks (even sponsored talks ;) )
(German) punctuality - strict control of the task length and overall schedule.
Great atmosphere.
Great organization - quick and efficient reaction on new challenges and changes ;).

What could be improved:

Physical infrastructure (WLAN, Toilets, etc.)

I would like to thank again Webshell (and especially Mehdi) and faberNovel for organizing this unique event. We hope to see you guys in Feb 2013 in NY and next year in Paris on API Days Europe 2013 :).

And last but not least the great quote from Amazon’s CEO & Founder Jeff Bezos (see in the presentation of Paul Fremantle):

Invention comes in many forms and at many scales. The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams.

API Days in Paris Day One

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:27:00 +0100

We are happy to participate in the first and the only API event in Europe - API Days. API Days is a two-days conference in Paris organized with help of faberNovel and Webshell.

Here I will give you a short summary of the best talks for today. First talk I visited was a talk from Kin Lane (aka. API Evangelist) on “Building bricks for your developper portal”. It was very interesting talk with allot of insight about internal evangelizing.

After that I was listening for another very interesting talk “Lipstick on a pig (How (not) to build a modern API on legacy system)”. Slides for the talk were very well done and talk itself was very entertaining. My take from it 3:30:3 rule - when developer is coming to the API website it should not take longer than 3 seconds to grasp the idea and the value of API, 30 seconds to register and 3 minutes to try out the API:

Next talk which was very interesting for me was about data semantic and the way how to annotate data in JSON with semantical information. Main stakes from there are http://schema.org efforts and (yet to be created) http://schema.io.

After that I did my presentation on API Days with title: “Application Integration in the Age of APIs”. I was talking about new challenges in the area of Application Integration that araise with explosive grows of APIs, SaaS and Cloud in general. Slides from my talk you can below:

After that we had a delicious French finger-food. In part two of the day one following talks where for me noteworthy:

AXA Banque’s APIs - interesting approach to open the banking data. Seems to be close to imposible for me before.
Talk about “Business models of APIs” by Guilaume Balas from 3scale. Interesting points were that number of private APIs is estimated to be 3-5x of number of public APIs. Guilaume also presented a very interesting concept on classifying APIs (sorry for the bad resolution of the photo)

And last but not least was a very nice talk from Paul Fremantle (WSO2) about “Strategies to deliver a Contextual API Experience”. Very nice and insightful talk, especially liked the part with the story about Boing’s digital airlines - where Boing build an API ecosystem around it’s planes which match physical ecosystem of the suppliers of plane parts.

All in all it was a great day. I’m very impressed how API Days are well organized, usual for such conferences delays and shifts in planning were not the case here which I believe all of the participants really appreciated.

Tomorrow I will blog more about Day2.

7000 and counting...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 14:33:30 +0200

2 days ago new milestone was reached. It’s 7000 now!

7000 APIs registered on programmableweb read the announcement on blog.programmableweb.com.

Our bet : 8000 milestone will be reached till the end of this year.

Everyauth compatibility issues with GitHub API

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 15:26:00 +0200

Refactoring is very common in software development. When refactoring only affects internal parts of your system, ideally your customers don’t even know about any changes. Sometimes refactoring introduces backward incompatible changes that cause the tools of your clients to break. That’s why most of APIs are versioned.

We are heavily using the GitHub API in our product. For example, we store the integrations created by our customers as GitHub Gists. We also use GitHub for authentication. Recently the GitHub API v2 reached its end of life. Because the latest version of the everyauth library (we use it for OAuth), is still using the GitHub API v2, our product got broken. The author of the library fixed the compatibility with GitHub API v3 in the the master branch, but it would probably takes days or weeks to roll out a new release. We can’t wait for so long. So, we decided to fork the library and fix the problem in a branch.

If you are using everyauth library in combination with the GitHub API, you might experience same problems. Feel free to use our fork. That’s why open source rocks.

User innovation with API, showcase mite

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 22:29:00 +0200

With this post we are opening our API Providers Interview series. In our previous blog post we were asking a question: how API providers promote and sell their APIs. So to better answer this question we went to multiple API providers and asked them.

In our blog we will do a multiple-posts API Providers Interview series where we will highlight some of the API providers and their experiences in providing APIs to their consumers.

This blog post will be about APIs provided by mite. mite is a SaaS product created by Yolk and it is a time tracking application. That’s what stated on the mite website:

Time tracking is vital for invoicing, accounting, and scheduling.
Yes, it’s been an annoying necessity for all too long. Let’s strike back.
With an advanced, yet simple tool to help you get things done: mite.

You might have heard about this German startup. They won Enable2Start startup competition sponsored by Financial Times Germany.

There are many other time tracking web and mobile applications, however what’s unique for mite it has a large number of 3rd party Add-Ons or Plugins. There are many mobile applications (iPhone, Android and webOS), desktop applications (Mac, Windows) and integrations with some other SaaS and Desktop billing systems.

To be honest I was very surprised to see how many 3rd party applications and tools were integrated with mite, and some of them are build for mite. Service provided by mite application have become a platform, and a key role for it were Mite APIs.

Here are some facts and numbers from mites CTO Sebastian Munz:

API is REST-based serving both JSON and XML.
Back-end created in Ruby.
Exists since 4 Years and was created in parallel with product.
Used by both external/3rd party tools as well as by the mite website.
Serving around 3,000,000 API calls a day.
Extensive use of caching based on memcache and HTTP caching headers (Cache-control and ETag). See our other blog post about HTTP caching headers.
API and Website statistics and monitoring is done with New Relic.
Simple HTTP Basic authentication over HTTPS is used. Users are can be authenticated with username/password or security token. With HTTPS all communication is encrypted.

From my side I can add that mite’s API is well documented (in English and in German) and what is also very nice it’s used by mite internally. Just like for Twitter, mite’s website is using the same API as 3rd party tools and AddOns. It is definitely a challenge to evolve APIs in parallel to evolving a product, but benefits from ‘eating your own dog food’ are paying off.

mite’s API business model is similar to Netflix. Companies and individuals attracted by service are primary users of APIs. With APIs mite can significantly enhance applicability of it’s service by opening the door for long-tail use-cases. For example when users are coming with specific reporting or integration requirements, which are too expensive or unique for mite to implement, APIs could be a self-service point where users could implement their requirements on their own. So on mite’s example we see that:

Open API is a key for user innovation

And once that happened you can be sure that your user base is your best business multiplier, you just need to support it and keep you APIs up and running.

In future we will post more blogs about API providers and how they develop their businesses with APIs, you can subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter @elasticio.

How do you promote your API?

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 17:32:00 +0200

APIs are everywhere. Just like ‘Mobile-only’ companies like Path there are ‘API-only’ companies like Twillio or Sinigly which whole business is based on API. According to programmableweb API business models are getting much more traction and attention nowadays.

In 2005 there were only 4 API-driven business models: Free (Google), Developer Pays (EBay), Developer Gets Paid (Amazon) and Indirect (Salesforce). In 2011 there are more than 20 business models identified by programmableweb, but most interesting part is how much bigger API market grown. Check the presentation below:

As you can see number of APIs is growing exponentially. Many companies are opening a new or existing internal service to public via making it accessible via API. However the most interesting question for me now is as an API provider how do I build a business on API? How do you promote and sell you API? How do you reach customers for your APIs?

Right now following is coming to my mind:

Put my API on the global directory of all APIs, like programmableweb.com
Develop a portal for developers (something like dev.mycompany.com) where I will provide a documentation and support for developers.
Create a libraries for different programming languages (the more the better) so that developers would be able to use my API from existing code.

If we take a mobile world, there the main distribution platform is AppStore(s). Once you got there you are getting access to the large user-base, who are (depending on the AppStore) willing to pay.

So far this model worked quite well for mobiles, do you think it would be possible working too for the APIs?

Just comment what do you think about it?