The New API Economy

by Kin Lane on 01/19/2011

Those of us in the tech community who work with APIs talk a lot about the API economy.

This refers to how the Internet is changing all industries on a global scale, and how APIs are a driving force behind this.

Behind the scenes, APIs are an integral part of:

Social Networking and Media - APIs were the driving mechanism behind Twitter and Facebook's community and made YouTube a ubiquitous video presence across the Internet.
Cloud Computing - Amazon Web Services (AWS) a leader in cloud computing started as ONLY an API.

APIs help enable the current smart phone revolution we're seeing with IPhone, IPad, and Android.

These API-powered movements are significant in our everyday lives and how we conduct business. Even though the term API economy applies in these contexts, it rings even louder when it comes the actual financial markets.

With the growing dominance of high frequency trading, APIs such as TD Ameritrade API truly signal the beginning of a new API economy.

These APIs provide programmatic control over:

Trading
Real-Time Streaming data
Historical Market Data

Cloud computing power like Amazon EC2 combined with financial APIs provide a way to make decisions and trade based upon real-time market data in extremely high volume and make decisions within fractions of a second.

The power cloud computing, social networking, mobile phones combined with APIs are truly ushering in a new API driven economy.