Presentation at HICSS 2017

1. Visualizing the Geography of
Platform Boundary Resources: The
Case of the Global API Ecosystem
Jukka Huhtamäki
Rahul C. Basole
Kaisa Still
Martha G. Russell
Marko Seppänen
http://bit.ly/apiglobal2017preso
http://bit.ly/apiglobal2017paper

2. Introduction

3. Why APIs?
• APIs are replacing “traditional” interfirm
relationships
• APIs are lightweight boundary resources that
allow for complementors to create value for
the focal companies
• APIs are artifacts of both lightweight software
development and business strategy6.1.2017 4

4. API vs. platform economy
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5. 6.1.2017 7Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0

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(Evans and Basole, 2016;
Basole, 2016)

9. 6.1.2017 11
(Evans and Basole, 2016;
Basole, 2016)

10. Why Geography?
• Digitization is eliminating “distance” and
therefore one can assume that geography
would have a smaller role
• At the same time, we see that large
companies continue to be co-located
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11. We asked
• Where are APIs located geographically*?
• Is the geographical location of a company
less important in the digital age?
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12. Method
• Data collection using crawling and scraping
• Data-driven visual network analytics
• Semi-automated data curation process
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14. Data curation
• 13,366 APIs and 6,271 mashups from
ProgrammableWeb
• Using URIs as identifiers, company location
lookup using Crunchbase
• Mapping the 6,218 APIs with location data to
city-level entrepreneurial regions and global
regions
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15. Results–two levels of analysis
1. Where are the APIs available globally?
2. How are APIs co-used between regions?

16. H
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17. API Co-use
• Cf. co-citation analysis
Three resulting connections (here
regions):
Twitter - Twitter Search
Twitter - Google App Engine
Twitter Search - Google App Engine

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Regions connected on
basis of API co-use

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Regions connected on
basis of API co-use

20. Conclusions

21. Takeaways
• API ecosystem is highly concentrated to a
few regions
• API ecosystem is particularly flexible for
actors to offer and consume services
• API co-use is not API usage
• Public APIs vs. Private APIs

22. Future work
• Investigating the internal company-level network
structure of entrepreneurial regions
• Introducing dynamics to the analysis: API diffusion
studies
• How policy makers can facilitate the emergence of
national and e.g. European API ecosystem?
• How will the changes in international data governance
policy impact the API ecosystem?
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