# The New API Economy

**Author:** kinlane  
**Canonical:** https://apievangelist.com/2011/01/19/the-new-api-economy/

Those of us in the tech community who work with APIs talk a lot about the API economy. ![](https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/financial/stock-market-display.jpg) 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](http://www.kinlane.com/category/twitter/) and Facebook's community and made YouTube a ubiquitous video presence across the Internet.
*   Cloud Computing - [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](http://www.kinlane.com/category/amazon/amazon-web-services/) a leader in cloud computing started as ONLY an API.

APIs help enable the current smart phone revolution we're seeing with [IPhone](http://www.kinlane.com/category/mobile/iphone/), [IPad](http://www.kinlane.com/category/mobile/ipad/), and [Android](http://www.kinlane.com/category/mobile/android/).

These API-powered movements are significkinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com 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](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1914724,00.html), APIs such as [TD Ameritrade API](http://www.tdameritrade.com/tradingtools/partnertools/api_dev.html) truly signal the beginning of a new API economy. ![](https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/financial/td-ameritrade-logo.jpg) These APIs provide programmatic control over:

*   Trading
*   Real-Time Streaming data
*   Historical Market Data

Cloud computing power like [Amazon EC2](http://www.kinlane.com/category/amazon/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.