I was just doing on of my regular check-ins with Pratap Ranade (@pratapranade), the CEO of Kimono. We try to make time to catchup on what each other are up to, and find where we can work together to incite API evolution. Pratap sees the space like I do, that APIs are more than tech, possessing huge potential when it comes to empowering folks to make change within their companies, organizations, institutions, government agencies, and the wider industries and countries they exist in.
Unfortunately I can’t go into too much detail about the projects we are working on until they are ready, but I just spend over an hour talking through some pretty interesting use cases that have occurred via Kimono Labs, in which Kimono users are scraping data and content from existing websites, and crafting some pretty interesting APIs. I’m not just talking about the fun things like March Madness or World Cup going on over at Kimono, I’m talking about influencing elections, addressing disaster recovery issues, and providing timely data that can influence how financial markets are working (or not).
The best part about these stories, is the work is being done, in many cases by people who don't have traditional programming skills, they are more hackers who have identified a problem, and used Kimono to scrape the data, and generate simple APIs, that help provide a new way of delivering API-driven solutions to the problem being targeted. Pratap said they are quickly becoming a big data company as well as a structured data API solution, because of the number of folks stepping up to address the long tail of data.
I just wanted to provide a taste of what we are working on. I’m always left pumped up about potential of APIs, after hearing what Kimono is up to. If you want a taste of some of the stories I'm talking about, check out the Kimono blog.
