This year, we visited Amsterdam’s APIdays again. Like last year the event was held in Hotel Arena and was visited by a select group of around 600 Technical and Business attendees coming from a variety of small start-ups and big tech giants.
As a Microservices Consultant implementing APIs, it was a great opportunity to join the world’s leading API conference. As APIdays says themselves they democratize and evangelize the use and the opportunity of APIs for corporations and businesses by focusing on events, content, research and consulting. APIdays Amsterdam 2019 dedicated its two-day program to the rise of contextual communications. With contextual communications meaning that both parties in a conversation know what the conversation is about. This is getting increasingly important in a world where customers and companies want to approach each other in a very personal manner while using automated tools.
My Top 3 Takeaways from Amsterdam’s APIdays 2019
1. Don’t be a sheep
The day started with a refreshing look on customer experience with a no-nonsense keynote given by Adrian Swinscoe, a self proclaimed aspirant Punk Rocker who insists businesses that create customer experiences can learn a lot from punk rockers; they should follow their heart and should not be shy of being different. This will only help them to make their customer-experience stand out from others.
Adrian Swinscoe at APIdays 2019 18th of June – photo from Koen Muysewinkel.
2. Do be a sheep
After the Punk CX presentation we got more on topic with a keynote about CPaaS, given by Andy Abramson, CEO of Communicano.
CPaaS stands for Communications Platform as a Service, a platform that allows developers to add real-time communication functions to their own applications without having to build backend infrastructure and interfaces.
Andy gave insight into the history of customer communications at telecom companies, followed by a quick insight in the future of Telecom Customer Communications, and it was clear that Contextual Communications are/will be essential for the telecom market. So in order to stay relevant as a telecom company you need to follow this trend.
3. Have the right mindset
Kevin Bouwmeester, Apigee Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, gave an interesting session about having the right mindset and approach when developing APIs. Where the right mindset in Google’s vision is the API Product Mindset. Basically having an obsession with your customer is key, followed by improving time to market and constant learning and iteration. Especially the focus on ‘consumption vs completion’ was an interesting point of view, where an API should be created to be consumed and not just to complete it.
I hope you now have some insight around what happened during the 2019 APIdays. Do you have any questions or remarks? Get in contact with us via our contact form. Or reach out to me via my contact details below.
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