Expansion is in the air. Quarterly reports are in, we are moving into summer and companies like Twilio, Evernote, Salesforce and Foursquare are expanding and growing at healthy, steady paces.
Mobile is king. I'm having trouble keeping up with the new mobile players in different niche areas, as well as all the big players paying strong attention to the mobile space including Yahoo, SAP, Intel and beyond. BaaS will continue to be a dominate theme throughout 2013.
The Internet of Things is prominent with tech blogosophere coverage, webinars and new companies rolling out IOT APIs and technology. As we see the rhetoric step up on autombiles, homes, buildings and other fast growing IOT areas we'll continue to see new companies and investment, the trick will be to sort through it all and make sense.
API management is definitely on everyone's minds. I'm seeing existing PaaS platforms make plays with API management tools, new database to API discussions and all the big players are as active as ever, even Mashery and Layer 7 after their recent acquisitions.
API testing, monitoring and other developer focused tools is my favorite new area to research lately. I'm seeing an explosion in this area with high profile launches from Runscope, TheRightAPI and a strong presence from existing players like SmartBear and Pingdom.
A new area I'm adding to my API trends monitoring is around what is being called Single Page Applications (SPA). There was a great talk by Steve Willmott of 3Scale this week at Gluecon on the relationship between SPA and APIs. But I'm also seeing major movement from devs and API providers in use of SPA oriented frameworks and libraries like Angular.js, Ember.js, Knockout.js and Backbone.js.
Beyond testing and monitoring, security is an important theme. As the API space expands, the concern for securing APIs and their accompanying web apps is growing. We are seeing major providers continue the roll-out of two-step verification, as well as security and identity providers stepping up to offer services in the space.
Overall the space is showing healthy expansion. New APIs, service provers and tools are emerging, while the existing players are expanding at a healthy rate. It has been a good spring for the API space.
