Before I explain the cryptic title, I have to give thanks to Dean Bubley for another acronym. UTFP stands for “Under the Floor Provider”, better known as our current Telcos. The future for Telcos is being referred to as the plumbing and dumb pipe providers. Let’s add another acronym to the mix.
While attending the Telco 2.0 Conference in Nice, Dean posed a question about “Under the Floor Providers” implementing the “Over the Top” (OTT) services and a unified API strategy. I’m not sure he ever answered his question, as I was too busy writing down the new acronym. This question was raised during a session about APIs, the best way to monetize, deliver and standardize, [...]

“Well, the problem is that SOAP is hard.”
It’s early 2007 and I’m dead in the middle of a conversation with a friend at PayPal.
“We were certain that developers accessing the eBay product data would want everything in SOAP and it just made sense to do it that way. It wasn’t right, though. Turns out, SOAP is hard.”
This is neither the first nor the last time I’d find myself submerged in the ‘what-counts-as-too-hard for data access?’ conversation, or the ‘so-who-are-our-users-REALLY?’ conversation that’s never too far behind. Every year sees the addition of yet more developers working in yet more languages inside of even more frameworks than ever before. And the unspoken corollary [...]

I just received a recorded message from the local Toyota dealership in Austin. The message indicated that my vehicle is due for service and then provided me with the dealership phone number so I could call and schedule an appointment.
The approach Toyota is taking in proactively reaching out to their customer is good, but it’s not good enough and, in this instance, it wasn’t frictionless enough to get me to stop what I was doing and make a service appointment.
What might Toyota have done better?
1. Indicate which car required service. I own two Toyota vehicles so how about listing the year, make, and model of the vehicle that requires service.
2. Provide more specific information. Indicate [...]