Developers' New Opportunity mdash; Retailers' Open APIs

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister examines the recent trend among retailers to provide outside developers access to open APIs mdash; one that promises opportunity for developers to transform retailer data transparency into lucrative business models. But whether the trend lives up to its potential remains to be seen, especially given the hurdles small and midsize businesses face launching programs similar to those in place at Amazon, Zappos, and Sears. 'There's a definite "Field of Dreams" quality to any such undertaking. Ask any company that hosts an open source software project how many outsiders actually commit code changes on a regular basis and you're likely to hear a discouraging figure,' McAllister writes. 'Similarly, just because a retailer builds an API doesn't mean anyone will actually use it. Given the uncertain prospects of return, it can be difficult to justify such an investment.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F06%2F17%2F1837240%2FDevelopers-New-Opportunity-mdash-Retailers-Open-APIs" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Developers'+New+Opportunity+%26mdash%3 B+Retailers'+Open+APIs%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F8Z UsWv" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/06/17/1837240/Developers-New-Opportunity-mdash-Retailers-Open-APIs?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N2hGjy9RGhZzJ0-3gFeKShygM18/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N2hGjy9RGhZzJ0-3gFeKShygM18/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N2hGjy9RGhZzJ0-3gFeKShygM18/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N2hGjy9RGhZzJ0-3gFeKShygM18/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/0ynWvaLCLBI" height="1" width="1"/

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