Seed funding and startups isn’t something I normally write about on my blog.  I tend to be more vocal about the technology, than the money.

Through exposure from Audrey and the ReadWriteStart Channel I am paying more attention to this world again.  I have plenty of business planning exposure from working at Palo Alto Software, but always felt like I had moved on during that time and didn’t really jive with the “business planning” community.

500 Startups launched their new web site today.  I’m impressed with Dave McClue’s approach to tech start-up financing and the portfolio of tech startups they have:

I am spending more time watching the latest generation of technology startups.  Slideshare, Twilio and Rapportive are three I am watching.

I had the pleasure of working with Christine Tsai, one of the 500 Startup team members during her time at Google, we worked on Google I/O together.

I will be watching the existing and new tech startups that 500 Startups invest in.

Here are Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from the February 2010 Future of Web Apps Miami conference.

You can watch the video and get the full transcript over at Think Vitamin.

Here are the 10 Principles of Successful Web Apps:

1. Speed
2. Instant Utility
3. Software is Media
4. Less is More
5. Make it Programmable
6. Make it Personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverabilty
9. Clean
10. Playful

Some great morsels of wisdom from the New York based technology investor.

Definitely a list you should follow when planning your web application.

I am walking through the Box.net OpenBox Developer area tonight.   Box.net offers a pretty robust set of API for managing files and content on the box.net platform.

It is a great example of a very robust API. They get you started with:

• Introduction to OpenBox Actions
• Getting Started Guide for API
• Easy Sig-nup
• Project Setup Page

They provide several flavors to their API:

• REST
• SOAP
• XML-RPC

They provide some some great code samples and libraries in all the top programming languages.

They provide a list of of all their API functions right off the left hand menu, broken down into categories:

• Authentication
• File & Folder Operations
• Sharing
• Tagging
• Commenting
• Download and Upload

They support their API with a developers blog and even provide an email address to contact them directly.    They even have a mobile API offering!

I think they offer a solid API.  As with many rockstar Web 2.0 applications it stops there.  They don’t offer a great API Community or Ecoystem.  Its pretty evident the API came out of the development team.

The API lacks consistency and seems to be spread between developers.box.net and box.net/developers.  The overall approach lacks community and even has some broken links.

They talk about some partners and API implementations on their blog, but don’t showcase their developers, partners as part of the API which really contributes to a sense of community.   Overall as a director of technology I would be hesitant to push for integration of the API because I feel like the API is kind of an afterthought and I wouldn’t get much support.

Without actual experience in integration of course, this is all speculation.  Although I think this reflects a common approach to delivering an API.  They come out with a strong product, but without a solid business, marketing and management approach it can leave a lot to desire.  Leaving many questions in my head that may lead to me walking away and look at other API solutions.

The ability to explain your API to developers and potential consumers is critical to the success of your API Ecosystem.  Whether its core API docs, samples, training materials or marketing materials your documentation needs to tell the story of your API and the business problems it solves.

I was just reviewing services offered by SDK Bridge.  They had me with the bullets points of their services on their home page:

• API Documentation—both conceptual and reference
• Sample code and tutorials
• Highly technical copywriting
• Training sessions on how to use software platforms
• Technology classes for youth
• We work remotely or on-site with your development team

Then they really drive it home by stating they are the bridge between people and technology.  So very true.

Quality documentation and reference material for your Application Programming Interface (API) can be the difference between a developer adopting your API or moving on to another vendor.

I’m adding SDK Bridge to my list of API service providers that can help you deliver a more comprehensive API Ecosystem.

I spend time each week to define the technology platform I use to accomplish business.   One of the goals of this platform definition is to assist in my migration to the cloud.

I realized another tool I use daily, but have overlooked.  I use Google Alerts to discover new information on blogs, search, and other discussions.

I follow the these key phrases / topics currently:

• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Application Programming Interface
• API
• Cloud Computing
• HTML5
• HTML5 localstorage

In addition to Google Reader and Twitter I use these daily Google Alerts to discover new sites, topics, and trends in my industry.  I depend on these to keep me ahead of the curve when it comes to technology that is important to me.

I also use Google Alerts to track the most important key phrase in my world…..”Kin Lane“.  Yes I am vain.

I learned about TOR,  a free software helps you defend against network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security while reading the Rolling Stone Article about Jacob Appelbaum and his TOR evangelism.

TOR is an interesting approach to privacy in this digital age for anyone looking for true anonymity.  It was interesting to see even the military uses TOR.

Now the Pentagon,  has launched a new project with the opposite intent, designed to discover  malicious behavior on Department of Defense networks.   The project is called CINDER (Cyber INsiDER Threat).

CINDER is to meant to discover potentially malicious actions and behavior on a network.  The goal of CINDER will be to increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks.

CINDER will monitor actions rather than isolated events such as specific downloads or search.  CINDER will track patterns of system usage and actions and compare with normal activity.

CINDER assumes that insiders are operating within the Pentagon’s networks, so rather than focus on keeping outside threats out, it will be designed to target those already inside.

It is interesting to see the tools being developed and used by all participants of the perceived cyber war.  As politicians. journalists, and other high profile people use TOR to guarantee their anonymity, high profile network owners are working hard to develop software to keep their information and networks safe.

I was happy to see the announcement by Google, that they were open sourcing more of the Google Wave platform.

I was at the keynote speech where they released Google Wave, and I really believed in the potential of it as a platform.

The code they released adds more features and delivers a more complete “Wave in a Box” solution.

This project will include:

• An application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• A fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• A persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• Refinements to the client-server protocols
• Gadget, robot and data API support
• Support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• The ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

Although it doesn’t have all the features currently available in the current Google Wave implementation it rounds out the open source offering and makes it a complete platform that is usable.

Some of the best features Google has kept for themselves, but maybe the core technology can have a life of its own outside of Google.  I think you will see new incarnations of Google Wave showing up as the core of collaboration and communication platforms for years to come.

I’m reviewing four major Application Programming Interfaces (API) today.  Zendesk, Scribd, Twilio, and Evernote.

These are all top web 2.0 or cloud applications.  Whichever label you wish to apply.

I am evaluating the different approaches to delivering their API Ecosystem:

• Zendesk - Offers web-based customer support software and their API is pretty much a feature or extension of that software.  They offer up API integration documentation and the rest is built into your Zendesk account area.
• Scribd - Offers cloud based document sharing.  Their API is packaged up neatly in a Developers / API area, with all the necessary building blocks for an API community.  Great API delivery.
• Twilio - Offers voice and SMS web services.  Their API is different because it is their core offering.  It isn’t a second thought or a different group of users.  Twilio sells an API.
• Evernote - Offers a web based note-taking and archiving web application.  Their API is not their core offering and offered through smaller developer area.  They showcase an application marketplace heavily where users can showcase web, mobile and desktop apps that integrate with Evernote.

Twilio represents a new age Software as a Service (SaaS) where the entire product is built around an API offering.  So they are kind of a different beast.

I would have to say that Scribd delivers the cleanest API Ecosystem with a great quick start, and robust set of building blocks for their API community.  Zendesk and Evernote have great API, but their focus on delivering a complete API Ecosystem is a little fragmented and overshadowed by their core web application offerings.

I have been reviewing a lot of APIs lately.  I”m evaluating their potential for integration into applications.

As I’m going through I”m also evaluating how they deliver their API community.

I was checking out the Scribd API tonight, and I like their delivery.  Its pretty straightforward.

It has the following API building blocks:

• API Overview
• Sign Up for an API Account
• API Tutorials
• Client Libraries
• User Authentication Overview
• Usage Limits
• Javascript API
• Mobile and E-Reader API and SDK
• Enterprise SDK
• Help / Support
• FAQ

They make it easy to sign up for an API account by providing links in navigation and on home page.

They provide client libraries in these programming language:

• Ruby
• Java
• PHP
• C# / .NET
• ActionScript 3.0
• Python

They just make it easy to get up and going by providing the necessary information and tools.

Its a good example to follow when deploying an API.

I finally got my Google Storage for Developers email invite the other day.  They promised attendees of Google I/O would get them quicker, it took 3 months.

I clicked on the link in my email and requested my keys and logged into the Google Storage Manager.

It has a pretty basic interface for managing your buckets and objects.  Just like Amazon S3.

Then I wanted to test out the interoperability of it.  Google claims:

Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service.

So I downloaded a common Amazon S3 PHP Class and changed the request endpoints, request headers, signature identifiers, ACLs, query string parameters and used my Google developer keys.

And it work.  It listed my buckets I had created through the Google Storage Manager.  I am playing with more to see how I can store files and content at both Amazon S3 and Google Developer Storage.

Now to figure out what I will use Google Storage for vs. Amazon S3.

I’m spending time going through RedHat’s Deltacloud set of cloud APIs.   They recently recently moved the project to the Apache Incubator and submitted it to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) .

With the Deltacloud API you can start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on Amazon EC2 or Rackspace.    This seems like the closest thing we have at the moment,  to a true cloud API standard.

Deltacloud Core provides:

• REST API
• Backward compatibility across versions

Deltacloud Aggregator provides a web UI in front of the Deltacloud API. With Deltacloud Aggregator, you can:

• View image status and stats across clouds, all in one place
• Migrate instances from one cloud to another
• Manage images locally and provision them on any cloud

Deltacloud API and Aggregator are free and open source and support the following providers:

• Amazon EC2
• GoGrid
• OpenNebula
• Rackspace
• RHEV-M
• RimuHosting

They will also soon be supporting:

• Terremark
• vCloud

They offer up a Ruby Gem for download.  I will have to get a new environment up and running so I can play with.  The ability to manage resources across multiple cloud providers and allowing for instance portability is very important to me.  Hopefully I can get time to play with more.

In addition to adopting Gist, I have quickly adopted a new tool that shows you rich contact profiles right inside Gmail.  It is called Rapportive.

I have heard about them, and Audrey uses them, but until I watched them present at YC DemoDay it didn’t really stick.

As soon as I got home I installed Rapportive in Firefox and Chrome.  Amazing!

You get so much intelligence on each contact in your Gmail inbox.  I started searching for old contacts just to see what it would show.

Rapportive is an essential tool in my social CRM toolbox.

I have successfully integrated social CRM service Gist into my platform.  I have bee using it on a daily basis for about a month now.

Gist allows me to integrate my:

• Personal Gmail account and Google Apps Gmail
• Personal Google Contacts and Google Apps Contacts
• Google Calendar
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Gist then gives me a robust, yet intuitive dashboard to manage people and companies I interact with on a daily basis.

I can set the importance of each contact and view social streams,  blog posts, emails, and events for all my contacts.

Gist gives me all these great tools for managing my CRM as well as bringing in tons of social and other contact related data.

Only thing I don’t like is that I really don’t have a public facing job at the moment, so my contacts list is very stagnant.  That is not really Gists fault though.

CloudCommons has developed the Service Measurement Index (SMI) Framework, a set of tools for comparing cloud computing service providers.

The Service Measurement Index (SMI) Framework uses the following metrics:

• Quality - There are often many different solutions to any IT challenge, and each solution has different quality-of service-attributes, such as defect rates, time to repair, resiliency and scalability. IT needs to be understood in terms of how well it provides quality, in business-relevant and granular terms.
• Agility - In today’s world, new technologies and approaches emerge at a dizzying pace, and IT must become nimble and agile if it is to take advantage of these developments. Agility speaks both to how quickly new capabilities are integrated into the service as needed by the business, and how easily the business can adopt different services or technologies.
• Risk - No organization can tolerate excessive risk, and yet the risk picture at any point in time is one of the least understood components of IT. Risk is multi-dimensional, ranging from obvious sorts of risks – the business stability of a key provider – to the less obvious risks, such as the effect of business ethics lapses on a provider’s customers.
• Cost - As a direct measure of efficiency, cost is of vital importance to IT and the business. Cost tends to be the single most scrutinized metric today, but it is important to express cost in terms relevant to the business. Cost must therefore be understood and allocated to IT services in a granular, business-centric way that provides transparency into the overall IT operation and relates to value.
• Security – Data protection and privacy is important to nearly every organization, but some have more stringent security requirements than others. Financial organizations, for example, have compliance regulations involving data integrity and privacy that they must meet. Security is multi-dimensional, and includes data retention/disposition, accountability, privacy, data loss, and integrity, among other elements.
• Capabilities - The definition of a given service can be found in the list of essential capabilities that it provides; an email service must be able to send and receive email and an e-commerce service must be able to manage orders. These key capabilities can be evaluated for completeness or user satisfaction, and joined by a larger set of essential other capabilities to further differentiate between various providers.

I’m very optimistic about where the cloud computing industry is going with standards like this for comparing cloud service providers and the DeltaCloud Cloud API becoming a standard.

I am needing more programmatic control over my Amazon EC2 environment.  I am rebuilding all server instances on my Amazon Web Services network.

I needed to reconfigure using EBS Volumes for file and data storage, and upgrade the operating systems and some applications while I’m at it.

So I’m creating all new AMI as well as reconfiguring my snapshot strategy.   The central object I use for programmatic manipulation of Amazon was limited.

I need to add some methods for managing the Amazon EC2 Volumes:

• CreateVolume
• DescribeVolumes
• AttachVolume
• DetachVolume
• DeleteVolume

I’m going to need to automate the create of snapshots as well, so I added the following methods:

• CreateSnapshot
• DescribeSnapshots
• DescribeSnapshotAttribute
• DeleteSnapshot

This will give me additional control beyond just creating and managing instances.  With my new EBS framework I have more granular control over different file and data stores for taking snapshots, etc.

With this more granular control over drives and their files and data, plus I was just able to offload a lot of “heavy files” like audio, flash, pdf, images, etc. storing all the files at Amazon S3.

I once quit a job because I got called into a meeting where the agenda was to discuss having too many meetings.

I had a chance to play with the AlchemyAPI I came across today.  AlchemyAPI is a semantic tagging and text mining Application Programming Interface (API).

I have about 10K web pages I want to extract top keywords and key phrases from.  I want meaning extracted from the words on each page.

AlchemyAPI provides nine methods:

• Named Entity Extraction – Identifies people, companies, organizations, cities, geographic features and other entities within content provided.
• Topic Categorization – Applies a categorization for the content provided.
• Language Detection – Provides language detection for the content provided.
• Concept Tagging – Tagging of the content provided.
• Keyword Extraction – Provides topic / keyword / tag extraction for the content provided.
• Text Extraction / Web Page Cleaning – Provides mechanism to extract the page text from web pages.
• Structured Content Scraping – Ability to mine structured data from web pages.
• Microformats Parsing / Extraction – Extraction of hCard, adr, geo, and rel formatted content from any web page.
• RSS / ATOM Feed Detection – Provides RSS / ATOM feed detection in any web pages.

I’m only using the keyword extraction and named entity extraction for what I am doing.  The whole API provides some great tools to quickly harvest, scrape and process content from the open Internet.

Their API is extremely easy to use and you can be up and running in about 10 minutes harvesting and processing pages.

I have a “hobby” harvesting project going on right now.  I’m am harvesting several thousand web pages from various locations on a certain topic.

I’m not really interested in the content itself, but the top keywords that are used in the content. I pulled the page and extracted the body content that I am interested in analyzing.

I then want to pull a list of the top keywords and key phrases used in the page.

So I am faced with next steps:

1. Spend time researching algorithms for parsing text and looking for words
2. Write my own scripts for identifying key words and key phrases (harder than you think)
3. Evolve and continue scripts to make more intelligent over time

There is a lot of time and money investment there.  Easy to give up on my project at this point.

I start looking for existing tools or APIs that would accomplish this.  I came across a great tag, keyword, and key phrase intelligence API called AlchemyAPI.

They have a great API that takes content, and returns an intelligent set of tags.  Now I am one more step closer to being able to extract meaningful key phrases and tag sets.

It is also a great example of how good Application Programming Interface (API) can assist developers in delivering projects.

I can parse any document or web page and tell you what words exist in the content.  I can tell you which words are most used or potentially meaningful in the content.

What I would like to have is more meaningful sets of key phrases and tag sets that are specific to certain topics and industries.

I would like to be able to sent a title of a page or blog entry to an API, then have it return several tag and key phrase sets that are relevant to run against the body of the page to see if they exist.

Then I could run a secondary comparison against various keywords I find in the body.

Make sense? Yeah geeky I know.  Just sharing a thought, out loud!!

Seems like an API you could build upon Google Analytics and use the TargetingIdeaService.  I will have to investigate other existing keyword tools out there that have an API.

I’m seeing a lot of chatter on the Internets lately about API development and best practices.  Like 10 Common Mistakes Made by API Providers at RWW and APIs: an Important Part of Product Strategy at ProgrammableWeb.

I had the pleasure of sitting with the engineer from Mashery a couple weeks ago and listen to their assessment of the API market.   Ever since then I’ve been reviewing their approach to API deployment and working to understand the playing field better.

Today I came across Sonoa and the free API tools at Apigee.  Apigee offers:

• API Testing
• API Debugging
• API Analytics
• API Protection

I’m checking out Sonoa and what they offer more.   I am also adding testing, debugging, and protection to my list of API building blocks.