Menu

What I’m Reading

Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.

Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API


by Kin Lane

on 06/01/2012

As a follow-up to the Executive Order 13571 issued on April 27, 2011, requiring executive departments and agencies to identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience–Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to deploy Web APIs.

The Whitehouse CIO has released a strategy, entitled “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People”, providing federal agencies with a 12-month plan that focuses on:

Enabling more efficient and coordinated digital services delivery
Encouraging agencies to deliver information in new ways that fully utilize the power and potential of mobile and web-based technologies
Requiring agencies to establish central online resources for outside developers and to adopt new standards for making applicable Government information open and machine-readable by default
Requiring agencies to use web performance analytics and customer satisfaction measurement tools

President Obama has set the timeframe for roll-out and accountability at:

Within 90 days of the date of this memorandum, create a page on its website, located at www.[agency].gov/digitalstrategy, to publicly report progress in meeting the requirements of the Strategy in a machine-readable format.
implement the requirements of the Strategy within 12 months of the date of this memorandum and comply with the timeframes for specific actions specified therein

Ok, can I call 2012, the year of the API now? Of course this announcement makes me extremely excited! This is something I didn’t think I’d see in the next 5 years, but of course I’m super skeptical too. Is this something that these agencies are capable of? Is there enough political will to make happen? I sure hope so.

I’ve seen some good coverage of this news on popular tech blogs, but we’ll have to wait 90 days and see ho many agencies have publicly reported on “progress in meeting the requirements of the Strategy in a machine-readable format”, and ultimately how much momentum this actually gets–or if it gets forgotten.

As soon as I can find an API with all government agencies and their websites, I will make a monitoring dashboard showing how many agencies have published anything, and what it contains, and report on my findings in 90 days.

Tags:

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
blog comments powered by

Crittercism raises 5.5m Series A from Google Ventures, Shasta, and Opus

Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures.

Today, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures have all re-upped, investing $5.5 million in the startup’s series A financing. Not, in fact, $7.2 million as the company’s SEC filing stated this morning. Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy tells us that the filing included the convertible note from the startup’s seed funding.

For those unfamiliar, Crittercism began as a platform that enabled mobile developers to diagnose and analyze app crashes as well as provide quick, easy customer support to their users. The startup has since expanded its focus and today officially announced its app performance management solution, which captures and processes realtime app performance data — not only offering crash reports and diagnostics, but realtime views for app loads, system logs, handled exceptions and transaction tracing.

Levy tells us that the solution works for both small, indie developers and enterprise alike, saving companies from having to throw all their engineering resources at the latest crash, and, in turn, let developers focus on the most important issues, like analyzing user behavior and tracking specific attributes so they can optimize app performance.

The idea, Levy says, is to help developers increase their user retention, ratings and revenue, and companies like Netflix, AT&T, Eventbrite, and NPR are already on board. The startup’s solution allows for realtime app diagnostics and performance analytics on both iOS and Android — in other words, over 125 million unique devices and 3 billion app downloads. It’s currently beta testing its HTML5 SDK along with BlackBerry and Windows Phone integrations as well.

Right now, similar to other infrastructure plays, for indie developers, Crittercism charges based on volume and for enterprise charges a small flat rate per month based on the number of active monthly users using their apps. The company plans to release further pricing info in the next two weeks.

As it’s now tracking over 125 million unique devices, the startup has scaled quickly over the last year, which Levy sees as being one of its key value props to big and small companies alike. At scale, he says, Crittercism collects data that other solutions don’t touch and can thus offer a greater degree of insight, both by normalizing their data and by giving them a peek into the performance of each successive release of an app. Did v2.1 actually attract more downloads, fix the bugs that were a part a part of v2.0? That kind of stuff is critical to mobile developers that want to get the best performance out of apps — especially considering that attention spans are decreasing, and there are plenty of options to overwhelm the consumer on app stores. There’s not as much room for error as there was even a year ago.

For more on Crittercism, check them out at home here.

Load More