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Twilio and Stripe are seeing explosive growth in 2020, highlighting a major software industry trend that’s getting gobs of VC investment | Markets Insider
Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson Twilio Companies like Twilio and Shopify have seen their stock price multiply during the coronavirus pan……
Twilio
Whether you know it or not, you probably use apps built with application programming interfaces every day.
APIs are tools that link together data and features from multiple different apps to allow them to essentially “talk” to each other. People can make payments on DoorDash or Postmates thanks to Stripe’s APIs, make calls directly from Airbnb and Yelp’s apps thanks to Twilio’s APIs, and get location updates on Uber thanks to Google Maps’ APIs.
API use has become has become so critical for companies, that there’s been an outcropping of firms that specialize in building APIs specific to categories like security, payments, feature management, search, shipping, content management, databases, and more. And many of those companies are seeing strong growth.
Experts don’t see this growth slowing down either, citing the need for companies to use APIs to build more effective products faster as they move to a cloud-based software model. And as companies move their businesses online during the coronavirus pandemic, the growth of API companies has accelerated, too.
“[Using APIs] unleashes flexibility – the ability for you to take code and help you innovate,” Chee Chew, chief product officer at Twilio, told Business Insider. “It also allows you to take code and change it and adapt readily.”
Developers love APIs because they allow them to build better products, more quickly. They essentially offer developers a prepackaged solution for a given capability that they can easily customize. Sure, developers could build those same functionalities themselves, but they would be starting from scratch on something that has already been created by domain experts.
Using APIs built by companies that specialize in them, like Twilio and Stripe, allows developers to cut out some steps, which speeds up the app-building process, comes with built in reliability, and still allows plenty of flexibility.
“They become building blocks for developers to build on it faster,” the CEO of API development platform Postman, Abhinav Asthana, told Business Insider. “Developers are driven by consumer and business needs. Consumers want broader functionality. [APIs are] the fastest way to build it and focus on what the company is good at.”
About 20 years ago, integrating APIs into your project was a much more complex process, according to Gartner research analyst Mark O’Neill, but it’s become a “hot area” because that has changed.
“APIs as a concept are not new, but what is new is what skills are there, and there’s a lower barrier of entry and more usage for APIs,” O’Neill told Business Insider. As companies like Stripe and Twilio have seen such success, “investor interest” has risen as well, he said.
For instance, startups like Auth0, MessageBird, Netlify, Postman, RapidAPI, Solo.io, Stedi, Strapi, and Stripe have all raised funding this year.
“All these companies that have APIs, like Okta, Atlassian – they have all done really well. In the private markets, it’s similarly reflected. There’s the same kind of buying pattern,” Kurzweil told Business Insider. “There’s more interest now than before.”
API companies also are becoming more specialized. For example, travel API startups like Duffel and Impala have emerged, and the company Foursquare has even transitioned into an API company to provide location data.
Netlify
“The more we take this architectural approach of figuring out how we as developers build things as developers, it’s easy to separate out functionality,” Biilmann told Business Insider. “The more we do that, the more opportunities there are to come in and build APIs.”
And it’s not just startups that are leaning into APIs, either. For many tech giants, they have also become a major source of business. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google Cloud build specialized APIs for their services. For example, the Google Maps APIs have become widely used by companies like Uber, Walt Disney, Trulia, Allstate, and more.
Recent years have brought a surge of mega-acquisitions in the space, too.
For example, Adobe acquired the e-commerce API platform Magento and the marketing API company Marketo for a combined $6.4 billion, while Salesforce acquired the API company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018. Twilio recently acquired the customer data API startup Segment for $3.2 billion.
Twilio
“There is a need for bringing this type of connectivity of data and for sharing data between multiple applications and multiple platforms,” Siti Panigrahi, managing director at Mizuho, told Business Insider.
In addition, financial services companies have increasing interest in banking APIs that can help them easily comply with financial regulations. For example, Mastercard is acquiring Finicity and Visa plans to acquire Plaid (although it’s facing an antitrust lawsuit). In both cases, a legacy credit card company is bringing on an API startup.
There’s also a greater need for APIs as even traditionally brick-and-mortar businesses have had to digitize.
Postman
“Almost everything is being digitally driven,” Postman’s Asthana said. “Because of that, there is much more demand for APIs. Every business will have a virtual storefront. That is powered through APIs. They need to build their own software and for that, they need to acquire APIs.”
APIs for digital commerce, healthcare, and logistics have become even more widely used as companies react to the pandemic. In a short time, companies have had to completely re-architect so that their businesses are available online, and building with APIs speeds up that process.
Nearly half of the respondents for Postman’s survey said they will increase their investment of time and resources into APIs over the next year, despite a tough economic environment.
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Source: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/api-companies-twilio-stripe-explosive-growth-2020-11-1029803396
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Annual Report and Sustainability Report 2021: New Wave Group AB
KUNGÄLV, Sweden, April 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — New Wave Group AB today published the Annual Report and Sustainability Report for 2020 on www.nwg….
KUNGÄLV, Sweden, April 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — New Wave Group AB today published the Annual Report and Sustainability Report for 2020 on www.nwg.se.
The printed version of the Annual Report and Sustainability Report can be ordered by email [email protected]
Gothenburg, Sweden, 14 April 2021
For more information, please contact:
CEO
Torsten Jansson
Phone: +46 31-712 89 01
E-mail: [email protected]
CFO
Lars Jönsson
Phone: +46 31-712 89 12
E-mail: [email protected]
This information is information that New Wave Group AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons detailed above, at 9:00 a.m. CET on 14 April 2021.
If you want to sign up for, or unregister from, future messages from New Wave Group, please send an email to [email protected]
This information was brought to you by Cision https://news.cision.com
https://news.cision.com/new-wave-group/r/annual-report-and-sustainability-report-2020-new-wave-group-ab,c3324550
The following files are available for download:
https://mb.cision.com/Main/932/3324550/1400837.pdf
Annual report 2020 (PDF)
https://mb.cision.com/Public/932/3324550/a895ddad28ba0b60.pdf
Sustainability report 2020 (PDF)
View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/annual-report-and-sustainability-report-2021-new-wave-group-ab-301268497.html
SOURCE New Wave Group
Markets Insider and Business Insider Editorial Teams were not involved in the creation of this post.
CEO
Torsten Jansson
Phone: +46 31-712 89 01
E-mail: [email protected]
Business insider
Elon Musk’s Neuralink scientists are not the first to get a monkey to control a computer with its mind
Elon Musk. Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images Elon Musk's Neuralink showed off its technology allowing a monkey to play video games with it…
Elon Musk.
Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink showed off its technology allowing a monkey to play video games with its mind.
- Scientists have been able to get monkeys to control computer cursors via neural interfaces since 2002.
- It’s an important test of Neuralink’s technology, but not a revolutionary piece of science.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
This week, Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk that specialises in neural interface technology, unveiled a fairly astonishing example of its work.
In a video released Thursday, the company showed off how far its come testing its technology on primates. In the video, a macaque monkey named Pager, which Neuralink claims has had a chip implanted in his brain for six weeks, is able to play video games like Pong purely via the chip. Playing the games correctly meant Pager was rewarded with a sip of banana smoothie.
This is, objectively, pretty amazing. As Musk put it in an excited tweet on Thursday: “A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip!!”
Perhaps even more amazing: monkeys have been playing video games with their minds for almost 20 years.
“Brain-control of computer cursors by monkeys is not new,” Professor Andrew Jackson of the University of Newcastle told Insider, adding that the first comparable demonstrations of technology like Neuralink’s took place in 2002.
A group of researchers in 2002 were able to show they could get a monkey to move a cursor on a computer screen at will, noting at the time that the technology could be used to help paralyzed people control screens in a similar way.
Jackson added the idea behind the technology dates back as far as the 1960s. In 1969, a researcher called Eberhard Fetz connected a needle on a meter to a single neuron in a monkey’s brain, and was able to train the monkey to move that needle using only its brain activity.
Neuralink, which was founded in 2016, is developing a microchip, which theoretically, would be implanted in a person’s skull, from which wires would fan out into their brain. These wires would be able to record brain activity, as well as stimulate areas of the brain.
The idea is that these chips could help study and treat neurological diseases and conditions in the near term. In the long term, Musk says they form part of his ideal of a “symbiosis” between human consciousness and AI (although experts have frequently expressed skepticism about this part).
Musk has been hyping up the monkey for years – but neuroscientists haven’t been that impressed
Musk first gave the world a hint about Neuralink’s tests on monkeys during a streamed presentation of the company’s designs in 2019.
“A monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain, just FYI,” he said, appearing to take Neuralink president Max Kodak by surprise with the announcement. “The monkey’s going to come out of the bag,” Musk joked.
Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, told Insider in 2019 that he was not surprised Neuralink had been able to achieve that result – and accurately predicted the kind of telepathic monkey computer-usage which Neuralink showed off in its video on Friday.
“The monkey is not surfing the internet. The monkey is probably moving a cursor to move a little ball to try to match a target,” Hires said. This pretty well exactly matches one of the games Pager was shown playing in the video released Thursday.
Musk started to hype up the monkey again earlier this year. “We’ve already got a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull … who can play video games using his mind,” he said during an interview on Clubhouse on January 31.
Musk is a canny marketer, and he’s very familiar with using his own peculiar brand of fame to merchandise and advertise his companies. It’s worth noting that at the end of the video with a call for people to apply for jobs at Neuralink – making for an ingenious recruitment strategy.
Neuralink is still doing new things, and the monkey is important
While neuroscientists have said the underlying science of getting a monkey to play video games with its mind is not revolutionary, they have praised the engineering of Neuralink’s wireless chip.
Speaking to Insider in September 2020 (following a presentation in which Neuralink showed off its technology working after being implanted in the brain of a pig) Professor Jackson said the development of any neural interface technology that doesn’t require wires to protrude out of the skin is a good thing, as it reduces the risk of infection.
“Just from a welfare aspect for the animals, I think if you can do experiments with something that doesn’t involve wires coming through the skin, that’s going to improve the welfare of animals,” he said, adding that further down the road it could have benefits for humans as well.
Elon Musk showed off Neuralink’s tech in a pig in August 2020.
Neuralink YouTube
Responding to the video released on Thursday of Pager the monkey, Jackson said while it’s not earth-shattering, it is an important proof of concept.
“I certainly do not mean to criticise them for demonstrating something that has been done before. It is a sensible way to validate any new technology. If you invent a new telescope, it makes sense to first point it where you know what you will see. So they are following a very sensible route to validate their device,” Jackson said.
Rylie Green, a bioengineering researcher at Imperial College London, told Insider: “The best thing I can see from that video is that the macaque is freely moving. There’s also no visible package connected to it. I would say that is definitely progress – not super innovative but a nice positive step forward.”
This week, Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk that specialises in neural interface technology, unveiled a fairly astonishing example of its work.
Business insider
Fintel Connect Introduces Fintel Check, an AI-Powered Content Marketing Compliance Tool
VANCOUVER, B.C., April 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Performance marketing technology company Fintel Connect announced the launch of its latest offering…
VANCOUVER, B.C., April 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Performance marketing technology company Fintel Connect announced the launch of its latest offering for the financial services industry, Fintel Check, a regtech tool to help financial brands keep their content marketing compliant. More than 50+ financial brands and fintechs are already leveraging Fintel Connect’s technology to enhance their marketing through its performance marketing network and tracking and reporting capabilities. Fintel Check represents the latest in a product suite designed to ensure financial institutions and their partners can meet emerging regulatory requirements in their marketing.
Fintel Check is designed specifically for banks, financial institutions and fintechs to monitor their product and brand content and ensure that critical information like interest rates, terms and conditions, and more are accurately represented in marketing campaigns.
The financial services space is highly regulated, with brands required to abide by strict laws and policies that govern advertising and consumer protection. According to Deloitte’s survey on regulatory and compliance trends in 2021, 91% of responding financial institutions expect to increase their use of automation and analytics to address regulatory compliance issues. Recognizing the steep challenge to continuously manage this across all marketing partners and digital channels, the team at Fintel Connect developed its monitoring tool to give marketers a way to more easily manage campaigns over time and scale their marketing efforts safely.
“Financial institutions are looking to scale their digital growth, and a key friction point to achieving this is marketing compliance,” explains Nicky Senyard, CEO and Founder of Fintel Connect. “Fintel Check gives our partners the efficiency and transparency with their marketing efforts and content management in a way that cannot be achieved in-house. We take the friction points and heavy-lifting out of scaling digital partnerships.”
Fintel Check uses AI and proprietary machine-learning algorithms to monitor, identify and report a brand’s mentions from publisher partners. Built-in reports provide complete transparency on coverage, as well as automatic screenshots that are stored in the company’s secure database and can be retrieved for auditing purposes.
The tool follows the launch of the company’s performance marketing platform Fintel Performance, released in January 2020. Through Fintel Performance, brands are provided a scalable, cost-effective channel for digital customer acquisition. Fintel Check augments this channel by integrating a layer of safety and content monitoring checks.
Plans are in place for the product’s next release in Q3 2021, which include added features such as custom compliance rules, expanded scanning capabilities, and more.
Banks, financial institutions, and fintechs that are interested can visit the website to learn more about Fintel Check or schedule a demo.
About Fintel Connect
Fintel Connect is a leading performance marketing company dedicated to serving the financial services and fintech space. Based in Vancouver, Canada, the team at Fintel Connect support a wide range of tier one banks, community banks and financial technology companies through its extensive network of publishers and fully scalable tracking and reporting technology.
If you’re:
Press and would like to connect, please contact Gilian Ortillan at 604.783.1724 or [email protected]
A merchant and would like to know more, visit https://fintelconnect.com/merchants.
A publisher that would like to join our network, visit https://fintelconnect.com/publishers.
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fintel-connect-introduces-fintel-check-an-ai-powered-content-marketing-compliance-tool-301262922.html
SOURCE Fintel Connect
Markets Insider and Business Insider Editorial Teams were not involved in the creation of this post.
The tool follows the launch of the company’s performance marketing platform Fintel Performance, released in January 2020. Through Fintel Performance, brands are provided a scalable, cost-effective channel for digital customer acquisition. Fintel Check augments this channel by integrating a layer of safety and content monitoring checks.
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