With the sudden glut of 5-inch (and larger) smartphones hitting the market, one may wonder if Apple plans to introduce one of its own. In response to a question on today’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook maintained his stance against such a move because of his unwillingness to make tradeoffs in areas like resolution, quality and app compatibility caused by such a devices. He stated specifically that Apple would not ship such a phone “while such trade-offs exist”, leaving just enough wiggle room for a future announcement where it can claim all those issues have been solved.
Editor’s note: David Teten is a partner with ff Venture Capital and founder and chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. 
3Scale has discounted the cost for managing APIs in the enterprise through a new plug-in it has added to Nginx, the open-source web Server technology. The plug-in runs inside Nginx and connects to the on-premise 3Scale service, which allows a customer to extend the modules that Nginx has for security, policies, etc. It connects to 3Scale features such as analytics and security services. 3Scales’s Steve Willmot said to me in an interview here at the Defrag conference that the service starts at $ 2,500 per month for five million API calls per day or 150 million calls per month. They also offer a standard tier of 250,000 API calls per day at $ 125 per moth. 3Scale also offers a free service. With Nginx, Willmot said a developer enters a URL for their API endpoint, then defines mapping rules through the 3Scale interface. It is then configured and added to the 3Scale service. API evangelist Kin Lane said 3Scale offers a pretty robust service for the price that it charges. It’s a cloud-type model with a freemium offering. You essentially pay as you go. This includes the integration of Swagger, a “specification and framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.” 3Scale uses Swagger to provide an open-source spec of the customer’s API that provides interactive documentation to make calls on the service. According to Swagger, the documentation of methods, parameters and models are tightly integrated into the server code, allowing APIs to always stay in sync. Willmot said that the company wants APIs to be easy to create, but it is important to have capabilities such as access control and analytics to make the service complete. Integrating open-source technologies gives 3Scale the capability to offer affordable API management services. In comparison, the Apigee platform costs $ 100,000. Anant Jhingran, Apigee’s vice president of data, said the company has also launched its own cloud service that is free to start but increases in price after the enterprise customer surpasses 3.5 million API calls a day. Mashery’s costs are in the range of $ 2,500 per month and up. Jhingran told me today at Defrag that the market for APIs is broad and deep. There will be customers who want a platform like that from Apigee and those who want a service like 3Scale. It’s a rising tide that will benefit a broad market of users. Mashery CEO Oren Michels said it is hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison
Electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn has denied earlier reports that thousands of workers went on strike on Friday at a plant that assembles Apple’s latest iPhone — reportedly causing production of the device to be “paralysed”. Today Foxconn said no such strike took place and claimed production of the iPhone 5 is on schedule, Reuters is reporting.
Editor’s Note: This is Redpoint VC’s Tomasz Tunguz’ second article in a series examining trends in the public and private technology markets.
I get asked a lot why Instagram is so popular. It might be because we just threw the first iPhone photography conference, 
Recent Comments