Stories

Kin Lane

Partnering For Me Is About Sharing Of Ideas, Research and Stories

I just turned down a potential partnership with a major enterprise company. As I do with many stories, I will scrub the names of those involved, because there is no reason to blame a single company, this is a lesson any large entity can learn from—for this story, we’ll just call them Acme Inc. Acme Inc. contacted me a couple weeks ...
Kin Lane

I Will Be Speaking At APIDays In Berlin Next Week

I getting ready to heading to Berlin in the morning. I'm scheduled to speak at APIDays Berlin on Monday. APIDays is the sister site to #APIStrat, an event you will always find me at, no matter where it...
Kin Lane

Exploring The Domain Universe At Emory University

When I say the word “domain”, what does it conjure in your mind? Most likely if you are in the tech space, or adjacent to it, you think of a Internet domain like "apievangelist.com". A virtual address you can use to point to different resources on the Internet, like websites, applications and APIs. If you rely on the diction...
Kin Lane

Business Of Internal APIs At IBM Impact Last Tuesday

I spoke on the business of internal APIs at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, this last Tuesday. About 15 people attended my talk, but the conversations I had with folks afterwards, ...
Kin Lane

APIs, edX, Tableau, Google At UT Arlington

After I went to Emory University in Atlanta, and spoke at IBM Impact in Las Vegas this week, I...
Kin Lane

The Toll A Car Takes

I currently live in Los Angeles, and I do not own a car. People often don’t believe me when I say I live in Los Angeles without a car, but I do. When I need a vehicle I walk down the road to Enterprise rental car and get the vehicle I need, for only the exact time I need it. This week I needed to attend a 2 day meeting in Pasadena. Sinc...
Kin Lane

Opportunity For Personal Data Lockers To Move Into Mainstream Consciousness

I was first introduced to the concept of a personal data locker after discovering The Locker Project by Jeremie Miller (@jeremie). For some of us activist oriented technologists, who live in a Silicon Valley driven world where data is the new oil, a personal data l...
Kin Lane

Join Me For The Kin Lane Show At API Days in Berlin May 5th And 6th

I attended a conference in Vancouver British Columbia last week. Well I didn’t actually attend or speak at the conference, I was just there to support my partner in crime Audrey Watters(@audreywatters). If you have seen me at events, you know Audrey and I usually travel together, and support each other at...
Kin Lane

I Will Be Talking Business of Internal APIs in Vegas at IBM Impact

The biggest impact APIs will have at your company will be the internal, cultural change regarding how you do business. We are in the middle of an explosion of APIs, and while there are many new public APIs emerging, the majority of growth is coming from the deployment of internal ...
Kin Lane

Your Password Management Process For Your App Sucks!

I just went through 52 services that I depend on, and experienced 52 different ways to manage passwords—most of which sucked! It seems that each service has their own way of allowing you to change your password. It would b...
Kin Lane

Reclaiming My Domain

After the recent heartbleed security fiasco, I’m spending my weekend going through my list of online services that I depend on, changing my passwords, and along the way I’m going to reclaim as much of my domain as I can. I will be ...
Kin Lane

Reclaim My Domain - Kin Lane

Over ten years ago I learned the hard away about my domain. I purchased kin lane.com from a website hosting provider I found online, and after they drained over 1K from my bank account for a simple $10.00 website and domain purchase, they proceeded to squat on my domain for almost two years. Eventually I got my doma...
Kin Lane

So Much Can Be Lost Through Automation

As I go through the management of my 60+ research sites that make up my API Evangelist network, I can't help but think about how I can automate specific aspects of the process. This is the way my custom built platform works, I have workflows and tasks I accomplish each day, and as I have time, I ...
Kin Lane

Main Stage Conversations At #APIStrat Next Week in Amsterdam

We are getting close to the API Strategy & Practice conference in Amsterdam next week. With less than one week left, I’m going to be really turning up the volume on API Evangelis...
Kin Lane

EU Companies Wanna Be Here, US Companies Wanna Be In Ireland

I’m spending a lot of time looking at the API landscape in Europe, trying to understand the companies behind some of the valuable API resources emerging from across the pond. It can be tough to determine the country of origin for many tech companies, for two reason: Many European companies want to look like they have a pres...
Kin Lane

Being Social Can Be About Code, Not Just Twitter or Facebook

I was looking through VersionEye today, a company that provides a notification system for software libraries. After I was done browsing the site I wanted to sign up and test drive, and when I visited ...
Kin Lane

Secure Communication Channels Over Any Network With Telehash

kinlane-productions2kinlane-productions2 Much like after 911, things will never be the same on the Internet after the Snowden-NSA revelations. Our delusional belief that the Internet is by default “open”, has been crushed, and corporate and government surveillance is now an expected part of daily life--ther...
Kin Lane

Why Are We Not Innovating On The Big Problems?

As I scan my news feeds I constantly see talk of all the innovation going on—everyone is doing it! In the same feeds I see lots of really big problems like people out of work, mega-drought in California, heating fuel shortages in rural areas, power grid issues, and the list goes on and on. On side of my news feed showcase how we...
Kin Lane

Thoughtful Use of JavaScript When Designing Embeddable Tools

One of the security blogs I follow is Schneier on Security from Bruce Schneier. If you want to understand what is going on around the NSA and security, Bruce is the guy. I was tweeting out a story from his blog today and n...
Kin Lane

The Challenge Of Educating New People To The API Space

One of my biggest challenges at API Evangelist is keeping content accessible for people who have just come into the API space. The most successful aspect of my site is the blog, and while I try to keep all my writing targeted outside the developer community, it can be...
Kin Lane

Essential Variable in Big Data Algorithm: Transparency

It is easy to get excited about the potential around “big data”. Many individuals and companies feel this latest trend is all about offering up big data solutions with business models that are built around algorithms, that founders consider their “secret sauce”. I don't have a problem with this, more power to you, ...
Kin Lane

Why Guest Posting Has Gotten A Bad Rap

As a proprietor of a small, successful niche blog, I can easily share some insight into why Google recently started punishing blogs that have guest posts. At API Evangelist I get about two offers a w...
Kin Lane

It Is A Start: IRS Enables Americans To Download Tax Transcripts

I recently talked about how an IRS API would be the holy grail of APIs, and after reading Read more →
Kin Lane

With Open Data There Is No Way To Submit Back

I have been doing some work on a project to develop an API for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. After getting the core API designed and published, I wanted to provide several supporting APIs that would help developers be more successful when building their apps on...
Kin Lane

Why You Are Missing All The Signals

I get a lot of requests from individuals and companies to partner with them to work on projects. Partnering can range from advising a startup, working on in-kind or paid projects or just having a conversation around a specific topic. Each one of these engagements, I guess you could consider is a sort of interview, for lack of a better descriptio...